The Prometheus League
Breaking News and Updates
- Abolition Of Work
- Ai
- Alt-right
- Alternative Medicine
- Antifa
- Artificial General Intelligence
- Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial Super Intelligence
- Ascension
- Astronomy
- Atheism
- Atheist
- Atlas Shrugged
- Automation
- Ayn Rand
- Bahamas
- Bankruptcy
- Basic Income Guarantee
- Big Tech
- Bitcoin
- Black Lives Matter
- Blackjack
- Boca Chica Texas
- Brexit
- Caribbean
- Casino
- Casino Affiliate
- Cbd Oil
- Censorship
- Cf
- Chess Engines
- Childfree
- Cloning
- Cloud Computing
- Conscious Evolution
- Corona Virus
- Cosmic Heaven
- Covid-19
- Cryonics
- Cryptocurrency
- Cyberpunk
- Darwinism
- Democrat
- Designer Babies
- DNA
- Donald Trump
- Eczema
- Elon Musk
- Entheogens
- Ethical Egoism
- Eugenic Concepts
- Eugenics
- Euthanasia
- Evolution
- Extropian
- Extropianism
- Extropy
- Fake News
- Federalism
- Federalist
- Fifth Amendment
- Fifth Amendment
- Financial Independence
- First Amendment
- Fiscal Freedom
- Food Supplements
- Fourth Amendment
- Fourth Amendment
- Free Speech
- Freedom
- Freedom of Speech
- Futurism
- Futurist
- Gambling
- Gene Medicine
- Genetic Engineering
- Genome
- Germ Warfare
- Golden Rule
- Government Oppression
- Hedonism
- High Seas
- History
- Hubble Telescope
- Human Genetic Engineering
- Human Genetics
- Human Immortality
- Human Longevity
- Illuminati
- Immortality
- Immortality Medicine
- Intentional Communities
- Jacinda Ardern
- Jitsi
- Jordan Peterson
- Las Vegas
- Liberal
- Libertarian
- Libertarianism
- Liberty
- Life Extension
- Macau
- Marie Byrd Land
- Mars
- Mars Colonization
- Mars Colony
- Memetics
- Micronations
- Mind Uploading
- Minerva Reefs
- Modern Satanism
- Moon Colonization
- Nanotech
- National Vanguard
- NATO
- Neo-eugenics
- Neurohacking
- Neurotechnology
- New Utopia
- New Zealand
- Nihilism
- Nootropics
- NSA
- Oceania
- Offshore
- Olympics
- Online Casino
- Online Gambling
- Pantheism
- Personal Empowerment
- Poker
- Political Correctness
- Politically Incorrect
- Polygamy
- Populism
- Post Human
- Post Humanism
- Posthuman
- Posthumanism
- Private Islands
- Progress
- Proud Boys
- Psoriasis
- Psychedelics
- Putin
- Quantum Computing
- Quantum Physics
- Rationalism
- Republican
- Resource Based Economy
- Robotics
- Rockall
- Ron Paul
- Roulette
- Russia
- Sealand
- Seasteading
- Second Amendment
- Second Amendment
- Seychelles
- Singularitarianism
- Singularity
- Socio-economic Collapse
- Space Exploration
- Space Station
- Space Travel
- Spacex
- Sports Betting
- Sportsbook
- Superintelligence
- Survivalism
- Talmud
- Technology
- Teilhard De Charden
- Terraforming Mars
- The Singularity
- Tms
- Tor Browser
- Trance
- Transhuman
- Transhuman News
- Transhumanism
- Transhumanist
- Transtopian
- Transtopianism
- Ukraine
- Uncategorized
- Vaping
- Victimless Crimes
- Virtual Reality
- Wage Slavery
- War On Drugs
- Waveland
- Ww3
- Yahoo
- Zeitgeist Movement
-
Prometheism
-
Forbidden Fruit
-
The Evolutionary Perspective
Daily Archives: August 15, 2015
Artificial Intelligence Robots Transhumanism Cyborgs 2015 …
Posted: August 15, 2015 at 5:42 pm
May 2015 breaking News End Times News Update Rise of Artificial Intelligence Robots Transhumanism Cyborgs Breaking News May 4 2015 PART2 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/carnegie-...
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence End Times news Update PART1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhBfl...
Breaking News New USA Warfare NO PILOT flying Fighter jet F16 Jet Flies Unmanned April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNYqG...
Trans humanism Elon Musk Telsa CEO says artificial intelligence demonshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAO9-...
UFO's Aliens Cyborgs Trans humanism deception Demons Fallen Angels Postmodernism Emerging Emergent Church Mysticism ISLAM religion mythology Black Magic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aovOj...
View of Earth from Satellite orbiting the Earth April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcrjo...
Solar Eclipse March 20 2015 & 3rd Blood Moon April 4 2015 Breaking News March 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E6dD...
What is going to happen in Israel and the world in 2015? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtluJ...
Not if but when Armageddon Final Hour Last Days News Prophecy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rivbe...
Bible Prophecy wars leading to Armageddon last days https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jH2B...
October 8 2014 Breaking News 2nd lunar eclipse of four 4 Blood Moons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO5Zm...
Eclipse Lunar April 4th 2015 Third (3rd) Blood Moon Tetrad Watch Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIUnM...
Breaking News April 4th 2015 Eclipse Full Lunar April 4th 2015 Third (3rd) Blood Moon Breaking News Tetrad Lunar Eclipse Third Blood Moon Bible Prophecy 3rd Blood Moon April 4th 2015 - Part2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFL_U...
Breaking News Blood moon Lunar Eclipse April 4th 2015 Bible Prophecy 4 Blood moons - Part1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwXlE...
Breaking news Solar Eclipse March 20 2015 & Sept 2015 Solar Eclipse March 20 2015 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZroQb2...
Breaking news Bowe Bergdahl being Charged with Desertion Faces Life in Prison April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv2dm...
Breaking News USA Woman Arrested on Suspicion of Trying to Join ISIS April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uku41...
Russia China USA Germany France UK Iran Nuclear Agreement NOW WHAT? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKiUt...
Breaking News World Chaos the Hour is at hand brink of World War 3 April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXBXb...
Breaking News North Korea Nuclear Threat says ready and willing Fire Missile Any Time April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5u2L...
Breaking News USA deploying 3,000 troops & 750 tanks for 3 month drills in Baltics over Russian Aggression April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7BWI...
April 2015 Terrorist group Al Shabaab massacre of Christians at university in Kenya Breaking news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eOB1...
Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Iran Nuclear deal reached on all key aspects Breaking News April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urqS9...
Obama Looking for Legacy in Iran Nuclear Deal as Iran Supreme leader&Iranians chant death to America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=972-k...
Obama shuns Israel so USA John Boehner goes to Israel shows USA unwavering Support Breaking News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmsbM...
Obama Foreign Policy Falures Yemen Ukraine Syria Iraq ETC. Breaking News April 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4NsD...
Breaking News Russia a Nuclear threat? Putin reminders Russia a nuclear power https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYRIw...
Surfing Video MXPX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZSoC...
Read more from the original source:
Artificial Intelligence Robots Transhumanism Cyborgs 2015 ...
Posted in Transhuman News
Comments Off on Artificial Intelligence Robots Transhumanism Cyborgs 2015 …
Internet censorship in India – www.ketan.net
Posted: at 5:41 pm
INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN INDIA: IS IT NECESSARY AND DOES IT WORK?
SARAI-CSDS
Short Term Independent Fellowship for 2004.
Internet Censorship in India:
Is It Necessary and Does It Work?
Ketan Tanna
Mumbai
Mobile: 91-9821034500
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my parents
Narottam (Bachubhai) Mulji Tanna and Kusum Tanna
as well as my friend Viraf Doctor
for their support and help.
Contents
1
Introduction
The curious case of http://www.hindunity.org and role of the Mumbai police.
2
Internet Censorship in India
Origins and blocking of Yahoo groups
3
Laws that govern Internet Censorship in India
4
Is Internet Censorship Necessary?
5
Does Internet Censorship work in India?
6
Internet Censorship- India vis--vis the world
7
Interviews
8
Conclusion
The rest is here:
Internet censorship in India - http://www.ketan.net
Posted in Censorship
Comments Off on Internet censorship in India – www.ketan.net
Ron Paul (finally) sends out a donor pitch for Rand – The …
Posted: at 5:41 pm
The headlines neatly tell the story. "Ron Pauls Passive-Aggressive Campaign Against Rand Paul."Rand Paul Has a Daddy Issue." "Like Father, Like Son? Not Exactly."Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has endeavored so much to distinguish his "libertarian-ish" views from his father's "voluntarist" politics that any snark from the paterfamilias generates a story. He'll joke that he's still looking at who to endorse; it will be reported like Saturn devouring his offspring.
There will be no snark this weekend. As Rand Paul heads out of the country for a medical mission to Haiti, Ron Paul will make a print and e-mail pitch to donors. It is his first such email on Rand Paul's behalf since the April 7 start of his presidential bid.
"I know the media likes to play this little game where they pit us, or certain views, against each other," the elder Paul will write, according to excerpts provided by the younger Paul's campaign. "Don't fall for it. They're trying to manufacture story lines at liberty's expense. You've spent years seeing how the media treated me. They aren't my friends and they aren't yours."
In the e-mail, Ron Paul will say that the enemies of liberty "fear Rand more than any other candidate," and that "unlike other candidates, Rand isn't depending on Wall Street fat-cats and banksters who want more special treatment, bailouts and stimulus packages to bankroll his candidacy."
The "banksters" language is a mainstay of Ron Paul's own fundraising appeals, which rollout of his Campaign for Liberty as frequently as CDs used to roll out of Columbia House (R.I.P.). It can be read as a knock on, well, anyone else; the libertarian reader might think first of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), whose fundraising has lapped Paul's with the help of hedge funds.
Cruz's campaign has already been trying to pull support from Paul, taking advantage of a polling slump that some libertarians blame -- ironically -- on the candidate's attempts to broaden his appeal. Ron Paul's letter addresses this directly.
"There is not one candidate who has run for president in my lifetime who can say they fully share my commitment to liberty, Austrian economics, small government, and following the Constitution, than my son, Rand Paul," writes Ron Paul.
Read the original:
Ron Paul (finally) sends out a donor pitch for Rand - The ...
Posted in Ron Paul
Comments Off on Ron Paul (finally) sends out a donor pitch for Rand – The …
Cryonics – RationalWiki
Posted: at 3:09 pm
Cryonics is the practice of freezing clinically dead people in liquid nitrogen with the hope of future reanimation. Presently-nonexistent sufficiently advanced nanotechnology or mind uploading are the favored methods envisioned for revival.
Scientists will admit that some sort of cryogenic preservation and revival does not provably violate known physics. But they stress that, in practical terms, freezing and reviving dead humans is so far off as to hardly be worth taking seriously; present cryonics practices are speculation at best, and quackery and pseudoscience at worst.
Nevertheless, cryonicists will accept considerable amounts of money right now for procedures based only on vague science fiction-level speculations, with no scientific evidence whatsoever that any of their present actions will help achieve their declared aims. They sincerely consider this an obviously sensible idea that one would have to be stupid not to sign up for.
Cryonics should not be confused with cryobiology (the study of living things and tissues at low temperatures), cryotherapy (the use of cold in medicine) or cryogenics (subjecting things to cold temperatures in general).
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
Cryonics enthusiasts will allow that a person is entirely dead when they reach "information-theoretic death," where the information that makes up their mind is beyond recovery.
The purpose of freezing the recently dead is to stop chemistry. This is intended to allow hypothetical future science and technology to recover the information in the frozen cells and repair them or otherwise reconstruct the person, or at least their mind. We have literally no idea how to do the revival now or how it might be done in the future but cryonicists believe that scientific and technological progress will, if sustained for a sufficient time, advance to the point where the information can be recovered and the mind restarted, in a body (for those who see cryonics as a medical procedure) or a computer running an emulator (for the transhumanists).
Most of the problems with cryonics relate to the massive physical damage caused by the freezing process.
Robert Ettinger, a teacher of physics and mathematics, published The Prospect of Immortality in 1964. He then founded the Cryonics Institute and the related Immortalist Society. Ettinger was inspired by "The Jameson Satellite" by Neil R. Jones (Amazing Stories, July 1931).[1] Lots of science fiction fans and early transhumanists then seized upon the notion with tremendous enthusiasm.
Corpses were being frozen in liquid nitrogen by the early 1960s, though only for cosmetic preservation. The first person to be frozen with the aim of revival was James Bedford, frozen in early 1967. Bedford remains frozen (at Alcor) to this day.
New hope came with K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, postulating nanobots as a mechanism for cell repair, in 1986. That Drexlerian nanobots are utterly impossible has not affected cryonics advocates' enthusiasm for them in the slightest, and they remain a standard proposed revival mechanism.[2]
A major advance in tissue preservation came in the late 1990s with vitrification, where chemicals are added to the tissue so as to allow it to freeze as a glass rather than as ice crystals. This all but eliminated ice crystal damage, at the cost of toxicity of the chemicals.
Upon his death in 2011, Ettinger himself was stored at the Cryonics Institute in Detroit, the 106th person to be stored there. In all, over 200 people have been "preserved" around the world as of 2011. [3] There are about 2000 living people presently signed up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute the cryonics subculture is very small for its cultural impact.
Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
Cryonics for dead humans currently consists of a ritual that many find reminiscent of those performed by practitioners of the world's major religions:
As the Society for Cryobiology put it:
The Society does, however, take the position that cadaver freezing is not science. The knowledge necessary for the revival of whole mammals following freezing and for bringing the dead to life does not currently exist and can come only from conscientious and patient research in cryobiology, biology, chemistry, and medicine.
In the US, cryonics is legally considered an extremely elaborate form of burial,[4] and cannot be performed on someone who has not been declared medically dead. You are declared dead and your fellow cryonicists swoop in to preserve you as quickly as possible.
The body, or just the head, is given large doses of anti-clotting drugs, as well as being infused with cryoprotectant chemicals to allow vitrification. It is then frozen by being put into a bath of liquid nitrogen at -196C. At this temperature chemical reactions all but stop.
Long-term memory is stored in physical form in the neural network as proteins accumulated at a chemical synapse to change the strength of the interconnection between neurons. So if you freeze the brain without crystals forming, the information may not be lost. As such. Hopefully. Though we have no idea if current cryonics techniques preserve the physical and chemical structure in sufficient detail to recover the information even in principle. Samples look good, though working scientists with a strong interest in preserving the information disagree.[5]
Recovering the information is another matter. We have not even the start of an idea how to get it back out again. No revival method is proposed beyond "one day we will be able to do anything!" Some advocates literally propose a magic-equivalent future artificial superintelligence that will make everything better as the universal slam-dunk counterargument to all doubts.[6]
Ben Best, CEO of the Cryonics Institute, supplies in Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice[7] a list of cryobiology findings that suggest that cryonicists might not be completely wrong; however, this paper (contrary to the promise of its title) also contains a liberal admixture of "then a miracle occurs." His assertions as to what cited papers say also vary considerably from what the cited papers' abstracts state.
Alcor Corporation calls cryonics "a scientific approach to extending human life" and compares it to heart surgery.[8] This is a gross misrepresentation of the state of both the science and technology and verges on both pseudoscience and quackery. Alcor also has a tendency to use invented pseudomedical terminology in its suspension reports.[9][10]
Keeping the head or entire body at -196C stops chemistry, but the freezing process itself causes massive physical damage to the cells. The following problems (many of which are acknowledged by cryonicists[11]) would all need to be solved to bring a frozen head or body back to life. Many would need breakthroughs not merely in engineering, but in scientific understanding itself, which we simply cannot predict.
This is the big problem. The two existing cryonics facilities are charities with large operational expenses run by obsessive enthusiasts. They are small and financially shaky.[20][21] In 1979, the Chatsworth facility (Cryonics Company of California, run by Robert Nelson) ran out of money and the frozen bodies thawed.[22][23] The cryonics movement as a whole was outraged and facility operators are much more careful these days. But it's an expensive business to operate as a charity.
The more general problem is that many cryonicists are libertarians and, unsurprisingly, have proven rather bad at putting together highly social nonprofits designed well enough to work in society on timescales of decades, let alone centuries. The movement has severe and obvious financial problems the cash flows just aren't sustainable, and Alcor relies on occasional large donations from rich members to make up the deficit.[24][25]
Insurance companies are barely willing to consider cryonics. You will have to work rather hard to find someone to even sell you the policy. There are, however, cryonicist insurance agents who specialise in the area.[26]
Of the early frozen corpses, only James Bedford remains, due to tremendous effort on the part of his surviving relatives. Though they didn't do anything to alleviate ice crystals, so his remains are likely just broken cell mush by now.
There are many medical issues connected with reanimation, but it is worth pointing out that a reanimated person faces numerous non-medical issues after returning to society. These might include:
All of these could cause the person great social, not to mention psychological, problems after revival. The person may also experience identity crisis or delusions of grandeur.
Cryonics, in various forms, has become a theme in science fiction,[27], either as a serious plot device (The Door into Summer, the Alien tetralogy), or a source of humor (Futurama, Sleeper). Its usual job is one-way time travel, the cryonics itself being handwaved (as you are allowed to do in science fiction, though not in reality) as a pretext for one of various Rip Van Winkle scenarios.
As a fictional concept, "cryogenics" generally refers to a not-yet-invented form of suspended animation rather than present-day cryonics, in that the worst technical issue to be resolved (if at all) in the far future is either aging, or the cause of death/whatever killed you.
Timothy Leary, the famous LSD-dropper, was famously interested in the "one in a thousand" chance of revival and signed up with Alcor soon after it opened.[28] Eventually, though, the cryonicists themselves creeped him out so much[29] he opted for cremation.[30]
Walt Disney, who is cited in urban legend as having had his head or body frozen, died in December 1966, a few weeks before the first cryonic freezing process in early 1967.
Hall of Fame baseball player and all-time Red Sox great Ted Williams was frozen after he died in 2002. A nasty fight broke out between his oldest children, who had a will saying he wished to be cremated, and his youngest son John-Henry who produced an informal family agreement saying he was to be frozen. This resulted in a macabre family feud for much of the summer of 2002. Williams was eventually frozen.[31]
Cryonics is not considered a part of cryobiology, and cryobiologists consider cryonicists nuisances. The Society for Cryobiology banned cryonicists from membership in 1982, specifically those "misrepresenting the science of cryobiology, including any practice or application of freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation."[32] As they put it in an official statement:
The act of freezing a dead body and storing it indefinitely on the chance that some future generation may restore it to life is an act of faith, not science.
The Society's planned statement was actually considerably toned down (it originally called cryonics a "fraud") after threats of litigation from Mike Darwin of Alcor.[33]
It can be difficult to find scientific critics willing to bother detailing why they think what the cryonics industry does is silly.[34] Mostly, scientists consider that cryonicists are failing to acknowledge the hard, grinding work needed to advance the several sciences and technologies that are prerequisites for their goals.[17] Castles in the air are a completely acceptable, indeed standard, part of turning science fiction into practical technology, but you do have to go through the brick-by-brick slog of building the foundations underneath. Or, indeed, inventing the grains of sand each brick is made of. (Some cryonicists are cryobiologists and so are personally putting in the hard slog needed to get there.)
Cryonicists, like many technologists, also frequently show arrogant ignorance of fields not their own not just sciences[35] but even directly-related medicine[36][37] leaving people in those fields disinclined to take them seriously.
William T. Jarvis, president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, said, "Cryonics might be a suitable subject for scientific research, but marketing an unproven method to the public is quackery."[38] Mostly, doctors ignore cryonics and consider it a nice, but expensive, long shot.
Demographically, cryonics advocates tend to intersect strongly with transhumanists and singularitarians: almost all well-educated, mostly male to the point where the phrase "hostile wife syndrome" is commonplace[39] mostly atheist or agnostic but with some being religious, and disproportionately involved in mathematics, computers, or physics.[40] Belief in cryonics is pretty much required on LessWrong to be accepted as "rational."[41]
Hardly any celebrities have signed up to be frozen in hopes of being brought back to life in the distant future.[42] (This may be a net win.)
Cryonicists are some of the smartest people you will ever meet and provide sterling evidence that humans are just monkeys with shiny toys, who mostly use intelligence to implement stupidity faster and better.
When arguing their case, cryonics advocates tend to conflate non-existent technologies that might someday be plausible with science-fiction-level speculation, and speak of "first, achieve the singularity" as if it were a minor detail that will just happen, rather than a huge amount of work by a huge number of people working out the many, many tiny details.
The proposals and speculations are so vague as to be pretty much unfalsifiable. Solid objection to a speculation is met with another speculation that may (but does not necessarily, or sometimes even probably) escape the problem. You will find many attempts to reverse the burden of proof and demand that you prove a given speculation isn't possible. Answering can involve trying to compress a degree in biology into a few paragraphs.[35] Most cryonicists' knowledge of biology appears severely deficient.
Cryonicists also tend to assert unsupported high probabilities for as-yet nonexistent technologies and as-yet nonexistent science.[43][44][45] Figures are derived on the basis of no evidence at all, concerning the behaviour of systems we've built nothing like and therefore have no empirical understanding of they even assert probabilities of particular as-yet unrealised scientific breakthroughs occurring. (Saying "Bayesian!" is apparently sufficient support with no further working being shown under any circumstances.) If someone gives a number or even says the word "probable," ask them to show their working.
One must also take care to make very precise queries, distinguishing between, "Is some sort of cryogenic suspension and revival not theoretically impossible with as yet unrealised future technologies?" and "Is there any evidence that what the cryonics industry is doing right now does any good at all?" Cryonics advocates who have been asked the second question tend to answer the first, at which point it is almost entirely impossible to pry a falsifiable claim out of them.
When you ask about a particularly tricky part and the answer is "but, nanobots!" take a drink. If it's "but, future nigh-magical artificial superintelligence!", down the bottle.
Cryonicists are almost all sincere, exceedingly smart, and capable people. However, they are also by and large absolute fanatics, and really believe that freezing your freshly-dead body is the best current hope of evading permanent death and that the $50120,000 this costs is an obviously sensible investment in the distant future. There is little, if any, deliberate fraud going on.
Some cryonicists considered the Chatsworth facility going broke to be due to fraud, but there's little to suggest it wasn't just the owner being out of his depth.
In widely-reported allegations by their ex-COO, Alcor have been incredibly careless with the frozen heads in their care.[46] Alcor denies all allegations, tried to get his book blocked from publication[47] and threatened further legal action. However, considering what fanatics cryonics people are, the allegations are unlikely to be true, despite how widely they were reported.
Cryonics enthusiasts are fond of applying a variant of Pascal's wager to cryonics[48] and saying that being a Pascal's Wager variant doesn't make their argument fallacious.[44][45][49] Ralph Merkle gives us Merkle's Matrix:
The questionable aspect here is omitting the bit where "sign up" means "spend $120,000 of your children's inheritance for a spot in the freezer and a bunch of completely scientifically unjustified promises from shaky organizations run by strange people who are medical incompetents." It also assumes that living at some undetermined future date is sufficiently bonum in se that it is worth spending all that money that could be used to feed starving children now.
When you freeze a steak and bring it back to edible, I'll believe it.
The basic notion of freezing and reviving an animal, e.g. a human, is far from completely implausible.
Instead of freezing your brain ... how about plastinating it instead?[69]
The rest is here:
Posted in Cryonics
Comments Off on Cryonics – RationalWiki
The Futurist: The Singularity
Posted: at 3:09 pm
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) seeks to answer one of the most basic questions of human identity - whether we are alone in the universe, or merely one civilization among many. It is perhaps the biggest question that any human can ponder.
The Drake Equation, created by astronomer Frank Drake in 1960, calculates the number of advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy in existence at this time. Watch this 8-minute clip of Carl Sagan in 1980 walking the audience through the parameters of the Drake Equation. The Drake equation manages to educate people on the deductive steps needed to understand the basic probability of finding another civilization in the galaxy, but as the final result varies so greatly based on even slight adjustments to the parameters, it is hard to make a strong argument for or against the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence via the Drake equation. The most speculative parameter is the last one, fL, which is an estimation ofthe total lifespan of an advanced civilization.Again, this video clip isfrom 1980, and thus only 42 years after the advent of radio astronomy in 1938. Another 29 years, or 70%,have since been added to the ageof our radio-astronomy capabilities, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation of our civilization is far lower today than in was in 1980. No matter how ambitious or conservative of a stance youtake on the other parameters, the value offLin terms of our own civilization, continues to rise.This leads us to our first postulate :
The expected lifespan of an intelligent civilization is rising.
Carl Sagan himself believed that in such a vast cosmos, that intelligent life would have to emerge in multiple locations, and the cosmos was thus 'brimming over' with intelligent life. On the other side are various explanations for why intelligent life will be rare. The Rare Earth Hypothesis argues that the combination of conditions that enabled life to emerge on Earthare extremely rare. The Fermi Paradox, originating back in 1950, questions the contradiction between the supposed high incidence of intelligent life, and the continued lack of evidence of it.The Great Filtertheorysuggests that many intelligent civilizations self-destruct at some point, explaining their apparent scarcity. This leads to the conclusion that the easier it is for civilization to advance to our present stage, the bleaker our prospects for long-term survival, since the 'filter' that other civilizations collide with has yet to face us. A contrarian case can thus be made that the longer we go without detecting another civilization, the better.
But one dimension that is conspicuously absent from all of these theories is an accounting for the accelerating rate of change. I have previouslyprovided evidencethat telescopic power is also an accelerating technology. After the invention of the telescope by Galileo in 1609, major discoveries used to be several decades apart, but now are onlyseparated by years. An extrapolation of various discoveries enabled me to crudelyestimate that our observational power is currently rising at 26% per year, even though the first 300 years after the invention of the telescope only saw an improvement of 1% a year. At the time of the 1980 Cosmos television series, it was not remotely possible to confirm the existence of any extrasolar planet or to resolve any star aside from the sun into a disk. Yet, both were accomplished by the mid-1990s. As of May 2009, we have now confirmed a total of 347 extrasolar planets, with the rate of discovery rising quickly. While the first confirmation was not until 1995, we now arediscovering new planets at a rate of 1 per week. With a number of new telescope programs being launched, this rate will rise further still. Furthermore, most of the planets we have found so far are large. Soon, we will be able to detect planets much smaller in size, including Earth-sized planets. This leads us to our second postulate :
Telescopic power is rising quickly, possibly at 26% a year.
This Jet Propulsion Laboratory chart of exoplanet discoveries through 2004 is very overdue for an update, but is still instructive. The x-axis is the distance of the planet from the star, and the y-axis is the mass of the planet. All blue, red, and yellow dots are exoplanets, while the larger circles with letters in them are our own local planets, with the 'E' being Earth. Most exoplanet discoveries up to that time were of Jupiter-sized planets that were closer to their stars than Jupiter is to the sun. The green zone, or 'life zone'is the area within which a planet is a candidate to support lifewithin our current understanding of what life is. Even then, this chart does not capture the full possibilities for life, as a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn, at the correct distance from a Sun-type star, might have rocky satellites that would thus also be in the life zone. In other words, if Saturn were as close to the Sun as Earth is, Titan would also be in the life zone, and thus the green area should extend vertically higher to capture the possibility of such large satellites of gas giants. The chart shows that telescopes commissioned in the near future will enable the detection of planets in the life zone. If this chart were updated, a few would already be recordedhere.Some of the missions and telescopesthat will soon be sending over a torrent of new discoveries are :
KeplerMission : Launched in March 2009, the Kepler Mission will continuously monitor a field of 100,000 stars for the transit of planets in front of them. This method has a far higher chance of detecting Earth-sized planets than prior methods, and we will see many discovered by 2010-11.
COROT : This European mission was launched in December 2006, and uses a similar method as the Kepler Mission, but is not as powerful. COROT has discovered a handful of planets thus far.
New Worlds Mission: This 2013 mission will build a large sunflower-shaped occulter in space to block the light of nearby stars to aid the observation of extrasolar planets.A large number of planets close to their stars will become visible through this method.
Allen Telescope Array: Funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the ATA will survey 1,000,000 stars for radio astronomy evidence of intelligent life. The ATA is sensitive enough to discovera large radio telescope such as the Arecibo Observatory up to a distance of 1000 light years. Many of the ATA components are electronics that decline in price in accordance with Moore's Law, which will subsequently lead tothe development of the.....
Square Kilometer Array: Far larger and more powerful than the Allen Telescope Array, the SKA will be in full operation by 2020, and will be the most sensitive radio telescope ever. The continual decline in the price of processing technology will enable the SKA to scour the sky thousands of times faster than existing radio telescopes.
These are merely the missions that are alreadyunder development or even under operation. Several others are in the conceptual phase, and could be launched within the next 15 years. So many methods of observation used at once, combined with the cost improvements of Moore's Law, leads us to our third postulate, which few would have agreed withat the time of 'Cosmos' in 1980:
Thousands of planets in the 'life zone' will be confirmed by 2025.
Now, we will revisit the under-discussed factor of accelerating change. Out of4.5 billion years of Earth's existence, it has only hosted a civilization capable of radio astronomy for 71 years.But asour own technology is advancing on a multitude of fronts, through the accelerating rate of change and the Impact of Computing,each year, the power of our telescopes increases and the signals of intelligence (radio and TV) emitted from Earth move out one more light year. Thus,the probability for us to detect someone,and for us to be detected by them, however small, is now rising quickly. Our civilization gained far more in both detectability, and detection-capability, in the 30 years between 1980 and 2010, relative to the 30 years between 1610 and 1640, when Galileo was persecuted for his discoveries and support of heliocentrism, and certainly relative to the 30 years between 70,000,030 and 70,000,000 BC, when no advanced civilization existed on Earth, and the dominant life form was Tyrannosaurus.
Nikolai Kardashev has devised a scaleto measure the level of advancement that a technological civilization has achieved, based on their energy technology. This simple scale can be summarized as follows :
Type I : A civilization capable of harnessing all the energy available on their planet.
Type II : A civilization capable of harnessing all the energy available from their star.
Type III : A civilization capable of harnessing all the energy available in their galaxy.
The scale is logarithmic, and our civilization currently would receive a Kardashev score of 0.72. We could potentially achieve full Type I status by the mid-21st century due to a technological singularity. Some haveestimated that our exponentialgrowth could elevate us to Type II status by the late 22ndcentury.
This has given rise to another faction in the speculative debate on extra-terrestrial intelligence, a view held by Ray Kurzweil, among others. The theory is that it takes such a short time (a few hundred years) for a civilization to go from the earliest mechanical technology to reach a technological singularity where artificial intelligencesaturates surrounding matter, relative to the lifetime of the home planet (a few billion years), that we are the first civilization to come this far. Given the rate of advancement, a civilization would have to be just 100 years ahead of us to be so advanced that they would be easy to detect within 100 light years, despite 100 years being such a short fraction of a planet's life. In other words, where a 19th century Earth would be undetectable to us today, an Earth of the22nd century would be extremely conspicuous to us from 100 light years away, emitting countless signals across a variety of mediums.
A Type I civilization within 100 light years would be readily detected by our instruments today. A Type II civilization within 1000 light years will be visible to the Allen or the Square Kilometer Array. A Type III would be the only type of civilization that we probably could not detect, as we might have already been within one all along. We do not have a way of knowing if the current structure of the Milky Way galaxy is artificially designed by a Type III civilization. Thus, the fourth and final postulate becomes :
A civilization slightly more advanced than us will soonbe easy for us to detect.
The Carl Sagan view of plentiful advanced civilizations is the generally accepted wisdom, and a view that I held for a long time.On the other hand,the Kurzweil view is understood by very few, for even in the SETI community, not that many participants are truly acceleration aware. The accelerating nature of progress, which existed long before humans even evolved, as shown in Carl Sagan's cosmic calendarconcept, also from the 1980'Cosmos' series, simply has to be considered as one of the most critical forces in any estimation of extra-terrestrial life.I have not yet migrated fully to the Kurzweil view, but let us list our four postulates out all at once :
The expected lifespan of an intelligent civilization is rising.
Telescopic power is rising quickly, possibly at 26% a year.
Thousands of planets in the 'life zone' will be confirmed by 2025.
A civilization slightly more advanced than us will soonbe easy for us to detect.
Asthe Impact of Computingwill ensure that computational power rises 16,000X between 2009 and 2030, and that our radio astronomy experience will be 92 years old by 2030, there are just too many forces that are increasing our probabilities of finding a civilization if one does indeed exist nearby. It is one thing to know of no extrasolar planets, or of any civilizations. It is quite another to know about thousands of planets,yet still not detect any civilizations after years of searching.Thiswould greatlystrengthen the case against the existence of such civilizations, and the case would grow stronger by year. Thus, these four postulates in combinationlead me to conclude that :
Most of the 'realistic' science fiction regarding first contact with another extra-terrestrial civilization portrays that civilization being domiciled relatively nearby. In Carl Sagan's 'Contact', the civilization was from the Vega star system, just 26 light years away. In the film 'Star Trek : First Contact', humans come in contact with Vulcans in 2063, but the Vulcan homeworld is also just 16 light years from Earth. The possibility of any civilization this near to us would be effectively ruled out by 2030 if we do not find any favorable evidence. SETI should still be given the highest priority, of course, as the lack of a discovery is just as important as making a discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
If we do detect evidence of an extra-terrestrial civilization, everything about life on Earth will change. Both 'Contact' and 'Star Trek : First Contact' depicted how an unprecedented wave of human unity swept across the globe upon evidence that humans were, after all, one intelligent species among many. In Star Trek, this led to what essentially became a techno-economic singularity for the human race. As shown in 'Contact', many of the world's religions were turned upside down upon this discovery, and had to revise their doctrines accordingly. Various new cults devoted to the worship of the new civilization formed almost immediately.
If, however,weare alone, then accordingto many Singularitarians, we will be the ones to determine the destiny of the cosmos.After a technologicalsingularity in the mid-21st century that merges our biology with our technology, we would proceed to convert all matter into artificial intelligence,make use ofall the elementary particles in our vicinity, and expand outward at speeds that eventually exceed the speed of light, ultimately saturating the entire universe with out intelligence in just a few centuries. That, however, is a topic for another day.
See more here:
Posted in The Singularity
Comments Off on The Futurist: The Singularity
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, prologue
Posted: at 3:09 pm
"Too often the pressing implications of tomorrow's technologically enhanced human beings have been buried beneath an impenetrable haze of theory-babble and leather-clad posturing. Thankfully, N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman provides a rigorous and historical framework for grappling with the cyborg, which Hayles replaces with the more all-purpose 'posthuman.'[Hayles] has written a deeply insightful and significant investigation of how cybernetics gradually reshaped the boundaries of the human."Erik Davis, Village Voice
"Could it be possible someday for your mind, including your memories and your consciousness, to be downloaded into a computer?In her important new bookHayles examines how it became possible in the late 20th Century to formulate a question such as the one above, and she makes a case for why it's the wrong question to ask.[She] traces the evolution over the last half-century of a radical reconception of what it means to be human and, indeed, even of what it means to be alive, a reconception unleashed by the interplay of humans and intelligent machines."Susan Duhig, Chicago Tribune Books
"This is an incisive meditation on a major, often misunderstood aspect of the avant-garde in science fiction: the machine/human interface in all its unsettling, technicolor glories. The author is well positioned to bring informed critical engines to bear on a subject that will increasingly permeate our media and our minds. I recommend it highly."Gregory Benford, author of Timescape and Cosm
"At a time when fallout from the 'science wars' continues to cast a pall over the American intellectual landscape, Hayles is a rare and welcome voice. She is a literary theorist at the University of California at Los Angeles who also holds an advanced degree in chemistry. Bridging the chasm between C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' with effortless grace, she has been for the past decade a leading writer on the interplay between science and literature.The basis of this scrupulously researched work is a history of the cybernetic and informatic sciences, and the evolution of the concept of 'information' as something ontologically separate from any material substrate. Hayles traces the development of this vision through three distinct stages, beginning with the famous Macy conferences of the 1940s and 1950s (with participants such as Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner), through the ideas of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela about 'autopoietic' self-organising systems, and on to more recent conceptions of virtual (or purely informatic) 'creatures,' 'agents' and human beings."Margaret Wertheim, New Scientist
"Hayles's book continues to be widely praised and frequently cited. In academic discourse about the shift to the posthuman, it is likely to be influential for some time to come."Barbara Warnick, Argumentation and Advocacy
Read an interview/dialogue with N. Katherine Hayles and Albert Borgmann, author of Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium.
An excerpt from How We Became Posthuman Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles
Prologue
You are alone in the room, except for two computer terminals flickering in the dim light. You use the terminals to communicate with two entities in another room, whom you cannot see. Relying solely on their responses to your questions, you must decide which is the man, which the woman. Or, in another version of the famous "imitation game" proposed by Alan Turing in his classic 1950 paper "Computer Machinery and Intelligence," you use the responses to decide which is the human, which the machine.1 One of the entities wants to help you guess correctly. His/her/its best strategy, Turing suggested, may be to answer your questions truthfully. The other entity wants to mislead you. He/she/it will try to reproduce through the words that appear on your terminal the characteristics of the other entity. Your job is to pose questions that can distinguish verbal performance from embodied reality. If you cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, your failure proves, Turing argued, that machines can think.
Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human lifeworld. The Turing test was to set the agenda for artificial intelligence for the next three decades. In the push to achieve machines that can think, researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at the heart of the Turing test. All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to think of information as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form. Writing nearly four decades after Turing, Hans Moravec proposed that human identity is essentially an informational pattern rather than an embodied enaction. The proposition can be demonstrated, he suggested, by downloading human consciousness into a computer, and he imagined a scenario designed to show that this was in principle possible. The Moravec test, if I may call it that, is the logical successor to the Turing test. Whereas the Turing test was designed to show that machines can perform the thinking previously considered to be an exclusive capacity of the human mind, the Moravec test was designed to show that machines can become the repository of human consciousnessthat machines can, for all practical purposes, become human beings. You are the cyborg, and the cyborg is you.
In the progression from Turing to Moravec, the part of the Turing test that historically has been foregrounded is the distinction between thinking human and thinking machine. Often forgotten is the first example Turing offered of distinguishing between a man and a woman. If your failure to distinguish correctly between human and machine proves that machines can think, what does it prove if you fail to distinguish woman from man? Why does gender appear in this primal scene of humans meeting their evolutionary successors, intelligent machines? What do gendered bodies have to do with the erasure of embodiment and the subsequent merging of machine and human intelligence in the figure of the cyborg?
In his thoughtful and perceptive intellectual biography of Turing, Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing's predilection was always to deal with the world as if it were a formal puzzle.2 To a remarkable extent, Hodges says, Turing was blind to the distinction between saying and doing. Turing fundamentally did not understand that "questions involving sex, society, politics or secrets would demonstrate how what it was possible for people to say might be limited not by puzzle-solving intelligence but by the restrictions on what might be done" (pp. 423-24). In a fine insight, Hodges suggests that "the discrete state machine, communicating by teleprinter alone, was like an ideal for [Turing's] own life, in which he would be left alone in a room of his own, to deal with the outside world solely by rational argument. It was the embodiment of a perfect J. S. Mill liberal, concentrating upon the free will and free speech of the individual" (p. 425). Turing's later embroilment with the police and court system over the question of his homosexuality played out, in a different key, the assumptions embodied in the Turing test. His conviction and the court-ordered hormone treatments for his homosexuality tragically demonstrated the importance of doing over saying in the coercive order of a homophobic society with the power to enforce its will upon the bodies of its citizens.
The perceptiveness of Hodges's biography notwithstanding, he gives a strange interpretation of Turing's inclusion of gender in the imitation game. Gender, according to Hodges, "was in fact a red herring, and one of the few passages of the paper that was not expressed with perfect lucidity. The whole point of this game was that a successful imitation of a woman's responses by a man would not prove anything. Gender depended on facts which were not reducible to sequences of symbols" (p. 415). In the paper itself, however, nowhere does Turing suggest that gender is meant as a counterexample; instead, he makes the two cases rhetorically parallel, indicating through symmetry, if nothing else, that the gender and the human/machine examples are meant to prove the same thing. Is this simply bad writing, as Hodges argues, an inability to express an intended opposition between the construction of gender and the construction of thought? Or, on the contrary, does the writing express a parallelism too explosive and subversive for Hodges to acknowledge?
If so, now we have two mysteries instead of one. Why does Turing include gender, and why does Hodges want to read this inclusion as indicating that, so far as gender is concerned, verbal performance cannot be equated with embodied reality? One way to frame these mysteries is to see them as attempts to transgress and reinforce the boundaries of the subject, respectively. By including gender, Turing implied that renegotiating the boundary between human and machine would involve more than transforming the question of "who can think" into "what can think." It would also necessarily bring into question other characteristics of the liberal subject, for it made the crucial move of distinguishing between the enacted body, present in the flesh on one side of the computer screen, and the represented body, produced through the verbal and semiotic markers constituting it in an electronic environment. This construction necessarily makes the subject into a cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into conjunction through the technology that connects them. If you distinguish correctly which is the man and which the woman, you in effect reunite the enacted and the represented bodies into a single gender identity. The very existence of the test, however, implies that you may also make the wrong choice. Thus the test functions to create the possibility of a disjunction between the enacted and the represented bodies, regardless which choice you make. What the Turing test "proves" is that the overlay between the enacted and the represented bodies is no longer a natural inevitability but a contingent production, mediated by a technology that has become so entwined with the production of identity that it can no longer meaningfully be separated from the human subject. To pose the question of "what can think" inevitably also changes, in a reverse feedback loop, the terms of "who can think."
On this view, Hodges's reading of the gender test as nonsignifying with respect to identity can be seen as an attempt to safeguard the boundaries of the subject from precisely this kind of transformation, to insist that the existence of thinking machines will not necessarily affect what being human means. That Hodges's reading is a misreading indicates he is willing to practice violence upon the text to wrench meaning away from the direction toward which the Turing test points, back to safer ground where embodiment secures the univocality of gender. I think he is wrong about embodiment's securing the univocality of gender and wrong about its securing human identity, but right about the importance of putting embodiment back into the picture. What embodiment secures is not the distinction between male and female or between humans who can think and machines which cannot. Rather, embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it. This realization, with all its exfoliating implications, is so broad in its effects and so deep in its consequences that it is transforming the liberal subject, regarded as the model of the human since the Enlightenment, into the posthuman.
Think of the Turing test as a magic trick. Like all good magic tricks, the test relies on getting you to accept at an early stage assumptions that will determine how you interpret what you see later. The important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman.
Footnotes: 1. Alan M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 54 (1950): 433-57. 2. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence (London: Unwin, 1985), pp. 415-25. I am indebted to Carol Wald for her insights into the relation between gender and artificial intelligence, the subject of her dissertation, and to her other writings on this question. I also owe her thanks for pointing out to me that Andrew Hodges dismisses Turing's use of gender as a logical flaw in his analysis of the Turing text.
See the article here:
Posted in Posthuman
Comments Off on Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, prologue
The Posthuman Project: Official Trailer #2 – YouTube
Posted: at 3:09 pm
Indie Superhero Film: 'The Posthuman Project' http://posthumanmovie.com
SYNOPSIS Denny Burke is finally about to graduate high school. Senior year has been one bad thing after another: a broken leg, a broken heart, and -- worst of all -- a broken home.
With four of his closest friends, Denny goes on one last rock-climbing trip to prove he's ready to start his adult life... On their trip the five teens receive a genetic boost beyond anything they'd ever imagined.
Denny's soon faced with the first big decision of his adult life: does he give up these powers and stay a normal teenager, or does he keep them...and graduate from the human race?
TAGLINES: Graduating from the human race. Unleash your inner hero.
ABOUT With the heart of a John Hughes film and the energy of X-Men, 'The Posthuman Project' is a feature-length independent superhero film which focuses on the roots of the teenage experience, capturing that careful mix of invulnerability and powerlessness that only youth can conjure.
FACEBOOK http://facebook.com/posthumanfilm
INSTAGRAM http://instagram.com/posthumanprojct
TWITTER http://twitter.com/posthumanprojct
How to Find this video: Geek Week, #GeekWeek Posthuman Trailer, The Posthuman Project, superheroes, avengers, x-men, The Breakfast Club, John Hughes, Days of Futures Past, The Wolverine, Iron Man 3, superheroes, Man of Steel, Independent Film, indie filmmaking, web series, superhero, teen movie, Kyle Roberts, Reckless Abandonment Pictures
Original post:
Posted in Posthuman
Comments Off on The Posthuman Project: Official Trailer #2 – YouTube
Suffer The Little Children, Pennhurst State Home: Eugenics …
Posted: at 3:08 pm
Suffer The Little Children: A Peek into the History of Eugenics and Child Abuse by the State - Pennsylvania Pennhurst. (Full Documentary) The ground-breaking 1968 NBC10 Expose on Pennhurst State School by Bill Baldini. Haunting Similarities to current horrors of CPS Shelters + Group Homes (abuse, money benefits contractors, children worse off). Once called the shame of the nation, Pennhurst was the epicenter of a civil and human rights movement that changed the way the world saw people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The atrocities of neglect at Pennhurst resulted in Supreme Court litigation that sounded the death knell for institutionalization worldwide. Pennhurst was the battleground in a monumental struggle to secure basic human rights for the last group of Americans to attain privileges assumed to be the natural freedoms of all persons. Pennhurst's historic and beautiful campus is, like Valley Forge and Independence Mall to the east, hallowed ground in the struggle for dignity and self-determination, a western anchor to a freedom corridor, that, though stretching but a few miles, reaches all the way around the world. Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance seeks to ensure that those achievements won at Pennhurst are neither lost nor forgotten. http://www.preservepennhurst.com/defa...
PA & EUGENICS - In 1913, the legislature appointed a Commission for the Care of the Feeble-Minded which stated that the disabled were unfit for citizenship and posed a menace to the peace, and thus recommended a program of custodial care. The Commission desired to prevent the intermixing of the genes of those imprisoned w the general population. In the Biennial Report to the Legislature submitted by the Board of Trustees, Pennhurst's Chief Physician quoted Henry H. Goddard, a leading eugenicist:- "Every feeble-minded person is a potential criminal. The general public, although more convinced today than ever before that it is a good thing to segregate the idiot or the distinct imbecile, they have not as yet been convinced as to the proper treatment of the defective delinquent, which is the brighter and more dangerous individual."
More on Eugenics in Pennsylvania - -- In 1857 the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision while it held session at Bedford Springs in Bedford, Pennsylvania. Dred Scott and his family walked into the Supreme Court as free people and walked out as slaves. Transferring authority from the parent to the state produced profound subservience and slavery into the entire culture. Millions of American families are now experiencing the very same fate as the Dred Scott family, as "family courts" and bureaucratic slave-makers are committing the very same atrocities in eugenics "kangaroo courts." http://bedfordsprings.blogspot.com/ -- Eugenics in America, Began in Bedford, Pennsylvania and Continues to Destroy through CPS Fraud, Abuse, False Accusations. http://robertscourt.blogspot.com/2009...
--- Cases --- PENNHURST STATE SCHOOL V. HALDERMAN, 465 U. S. 89 (1984). The Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that the MH/MR Act required the State to adopt the "least restrictive environment" approach for the care of the mentally retarded, and rejecting petitioners' argument that the Eleventh Amendment barred a federal court from considering this pendent state law claim. The court reasoned that, since that Amendment did not bar a federal court from granting prospective injunctive relief against state officials on the basis of federal claims, citing Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123, the same result obtained with respect to a pendent state law claim. HELD: Eleventh Amendment prohibited the District Court from ordering state officials to conform their conduct to state law. Pp. 465 U. S. 97-124. (a) The principle of sovereign immunity is a constitutional limitation on the federal judicial power established in Art. III of the Constitution. The Eleventh Amendment bars a suit against state officials when the State is the real, substantial party in interest, regardless of whether the suit seeks damages or injunctive relief. The Court in Ex parte Young, supra, recognized an important exception to this general rule: a suit challenging the federal constitutionality of a state official's action is not one against the State. Pp. 465 U. S. 97-103. http://supreme.justia.com/us/465/89/
EX PARTE YOUNG, 209 U.S. 123 (1908), Whether a state statute is unconstitutional because the penalties for its violation are so enormous that persons affected thereby are prevented from resorting to the courts for the purpose of determining the validity of the statute, and are thereby denied the equal protection of the law, and their property rendered liable to be taken without due process of law, is a Federal question and gives the Circuit Court jurisdiction. http://supreme.justia.com/us/209/123/...
Continued here:
Suffer The Little Children, Pennhurst State Home: Eugenics ...
Posted in Eugenics
Comments Off on Suffer The Little Children, Pennhurst State Home: Eugenics …
The Negro Project and Margaret Sanger
Posted: at 3:08 pm
The Negro Project Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Plan for Black Americans By Tanya L. Green posted at Concerned Women of America
May 10, 2001
'Civil rights' doesn't mean anything without a right to life! declared Hunter. He and the other marchers were protesting the disproportionately high number of abortions in the black community. The high number is no accident. Many Americansblack and whiteare unaware of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's Negro Project. Sanger created this program in 1939, after the organization changed its name from the American Birth Control League (ABCL) to the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA).1
The aim of the program was to restrictmany believe exterminatethe black population. Under the pretense of better health and family planning, Sanger cleverly implemented her plan. What's more shocking is Sanger's beguilement of black America's crme de la crmethose prominent, well educated and well-to-dointo executing her scheme. Some within the black elite saw birth control as a means to attain economic empowerment, elevate the race and garner the respect of whites.
The Negro Project has had lasting repercussions in the black community: We have become victims of genocide by our own hands, cried Hunter at the Say So march.
Margaret Sanger aligned herself with the eugenicists whose ideology prevailed in the early 20th century. Eugenicists strongly espoused racial supremacy and purity, particularly of the Aryan race. Eugenicists hoped to purify the bloodlines and improve the race by encouraging the fit to reproduce and the unfit to restrict their reproduction. They sought to contain the inferior races through segregation, sterilization, birth control and abortion.
Sanger embraced Malthusian eugenics. Thomas Robert Malthus, a 19th-century cleric and professor of political economy, believed a population time bomb threatened the existence of the human race.2 He viewed social problems such as poverty, deprivation and hunger as evidence of this population crisis. According to writer George Grant, Malthus condemned charities and other forms of benevolence, because he believed they only exacerbated the problems. His answer was to restrict population growth of certain groups of people.3 His theories of population growth and economic stability became the basis for national and international social policy. Grant quotes from Malthus' magnum opus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in six editions from 1798 to 1826:
Malthus' disciples believed if Western civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to be suppressed and isolatedor even, perhaps, eliminated. His disciples felt the subtler and more scientific approaches of education, contraception, sterilization and abortion were more practical and acceptable ways to ease the pressures of the alleged overpopulation.5
Critics of Malthusianism said the group produced a new vocabulary of mumbo-jumbo. It was all hard-headed, scientific and relentless. Further, historical facts have proved the Malthusian mathematical scheme regarding overpopulation to be inaccurate, though many still believe them.6
Despite the falsehoods of Malthus' overpopulation claims, Sanger nonetheless immersed herself in Malthusian eugenics. Grant wrote she argued for birth control using the scientifically verified threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension and overpopulation as its background. Sanger's publication, The Birth Control Review (founded in 1917) regularly published pro-eugenic articles from eugenicists, such as Ernst Rudin.7 Although Sanger ceased editing The Birth Control Review in 1929, the ABCL continued to use it as a platform for eugenic ideas.
Sanger built the work of the ABCL, and, ultimately, Planned Parenthood, on the ideas and resources of the eugenics movement. Grant reported that virtually all of the organization's board members were eugenicists. Eugenicists financed the early projects, from the opening of birth control clinics to the publishing of revolutionary literature. Eugenicists comprised the speakers at conferences, authors of literature and the providers of services almost without exception. And Planned Parenthood's international work was originally housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society. The two organizations were intertwined for years.8
The ABCL became a legal entity on April 22, 1922, in New York. Before that, Sanger illegally operated a birth control clinic in October 1916, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, which eventually closed. The clinic serviced the poor immigrants who heavily populated the areathose deemed unfit to reproduce.9
Sanger's early writings clearly reflected Malthus' influence. She writes:
In another passage, she decries the burden of human waste on society:
She concluded,
The Review printed an excerpt of an address Sanger gave in 1926. In it she said:
Sanger said a bonus would be wise and profitable and the salvation of American civilization.14 She presented her ideas to Mr. C. Harold Smith (of the New York Evening World) on the welfare committee in New York City. She said, people must be helped to help themselves. Any plan or program that would make them dependent upon doles and charities is paternalistic and would not be of any permanent value. She included an essay (what she called a program of public welfare,) entitled We Must Breed a Race of Thoroughbreds.15
In it she argued that birth control clinics, or bureaus, should be established in which men and women will be taught the science of parenthood and the science of breeding. For this was the way to breed out of the race the scourges of transmissible disease, mental defect, poverty, lawlessness, crime ... since these classes would be decreasing in number instead of breeding like weeds [emphasis added].16
Her program called for women to receive birth control advice in various situations, including where:
Sanger said such a plan would ... reduce the birthrate among the diseased, the sickly, the poverty stricken and anti-social classes, elements unable to provide for themselves, and the burden of which we are all forced to carry.17
Sanger had openly embraced Malthusian eugenics, and it shaped her actions in the ensuing years.
In 1929, 10 years before Sanger created the Negro Project, the ABCL laid the groundwork for a clinic in Harlem, a largely black section of New York City. It was the dawn of the Great Depression, and for blacks that meant double the misery. Blacks faced harsher conditions of desperation and privation because of widespread racial prejudice and discrimination. From the ABCL's perspective, Harlem was the ideal place for this experimental clinic, which officially opened on November 21, 1930. Many blacks looked to escape their adverse circumstances and therefore did not recognize the eugenic undercurrent of the clinic. The clinic relied on the generosity of private foundations to remain in business.18 In addition to being thought of as inferior and disproportionately represented in the underclass, according to the clinic's own files used to justify its work, blacks in Harlem:
Although the clinic served whites as well as blacks, it was established for the benefit of the colored people. Sanger wrote this in a letter to Dr. W. E. Burghardt DuBois,20 one of the day's most influential blacks. A sociologist and author, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 to improve the living conditions of black Americans.
That blacks endured extreme prejudice and discrimination, which contributed greatly to their plight, seemed to further justify restricting their numbers. Many believed the solution lay in reducing reproduction. Sanger suggested the answer to poverty and degradation lay in smaller numbers of blacks. She convinced black civic groups in Harlem of the benefits of birth control, under the cloak of better health (i.e., reduction of maternal and infant death; child spacing) and family planning. So with their cooperation, and the endorsement of The Amsterdam News (a prominent black newspaper), Sanger established the Harlem branch of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.21 The ABCL told the community birth control was the answer to their predicament.
Sanger shrewdly used the influence of prominent blacks to reach the masses with this message. She invited DuBois and a host of Harlem's leading blacks, including physicians, social workers, ministers and journalists, to form an advisory council to help direct the clinic so that our work in birth control will be a constructive force in the community.22 She knew the importance of having black professionals on the advisory board and in the clinic; she knew blacks would instinctively suspect whites of wanting to decrease their numbers. She would later use this knowledge to implement the Negro Project.
Sanger convinced the community so well that Harlem's largest black church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church, held a mass meeting featuring Sanger as the speaker.23 But that event received criticism. At least one very prominent minister of a denomination other than Baptist spoke out against Sanger. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., pastor of Abyssinian Baptist, received adverse criticism from the (unnamed) minister who was surprised that he'd allow that awful woman in his church.24
Grace Congregational Church hosted a debate on birth control. Proponents argued birth control was necessary to regulate births in proportion to the family's income; spacing births would help mothers recover physically and fathers financially; physically strong and mentally sound babies would result; and incidences of communicable diseases would decrease.
Opponents contended that as a minority group blacks needed to increase rather than decrease and that they needed an equal distribution of wealth to improve their status. In the end, the debate judges decided the proponents were more persuasive: Birth control would improve the status of blacks.25 Still, there were others who equated birth control with abortion and therefore considered it immoral.
Eventually, the Urban League took control of the clinic,26 an indication the black community had become ensnared in Sanger's labyrinth.
The Harlem clinic and ensuing birth control debate opened dialogue among blacks about how best to improve their disadvantageous position. Some viewed birth control as a viable solution: High reproduction, they believed, meant prolonged poverty and degradation. Desperate for change, others began to accept the rationale of birth control. A few embraced eugenics. The June 1932 edition of The Birth Control Review, called The Negro Number, featured a series of articles written by blacks on the virtues of birth control.
The editorial posed this question: Shall they go in for quantity or quality in children? Shall they bring children into the world to enrich the undertakers, the physicians and furnish work for social workers and jailers, or shall they produce children who are going to be an asset to the group and American society? The answer: Most [blacks], especially women, would choose quality ... if they only knew how.27
DuBois, in his article Black Folk and Birth Control, noted the inevitable clash of ideals between those Negroes who were striving to improve their economic position and those whose religious faith made the limitation of children a sin.28 He criticized the mass of ignorant Negroes who bred carelessly and disastrously so that the increase among [them] ... is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.29
DuBois called for a more liberal attitude among black churches. He said they were open to intelligent propaganda of any sort, and the American Birth Control League and other agencies ought to get their speakers before church congregations and their arguments in the Negro newspapers [emphasis added].30
Charles S. Johnson, Fisk University's first black president, wrote eugenic discrimination was necessary for blacks.31 He said the high maternal and infant mortality rates, along with diseases like tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria and venereal infection, made it difficult for large families to adequately sustain themselves.
Further, the status of Negroes as marginal workers, their confinement to the lowest paid branches of industry, the necessity for the labors of mothers, as well as children, to balance meager budgets, are factors [that] emphasize the need for lessening the burden not only for themselves, but of society, which must provide the supplementary support in the form of relief.32 Johnson later served on the National Advisory Council to the BCFA, becoming integral to the Negro Project.
Writer Walter A. Terpenning described bringing a black child into a hostile world as pathetic. In his article God's Chillun, he wrote:
Terpenning considered birth control for blacks as the more humane provision and more eugenic than among whites. He felt birth control information should have first been disseminated among blacks rather than the white upper crust.34 He failed to look at the problematic attitudes and behavior of society and how they suppressed blacks. He offered no solutions to the injustice and vile racism that blacks endured.
Sadly, DuBois' words of black churches being open to intelligent propaganda proved prophetic. Black pastors invited Sanger to speak to their congregations. Black publications, like The Afro-American and The Chicago Defender, featured her writings. Rather than attacking the root causes of maternal and infant deaths, diseases, poverty, unemployment and a host of other social illsnot the least of which was racismSanger pushed birth control. To many, it was better for blacks not to be born rather than endure such a harsh existence.
Against this setting, Sanger charmed the black community's most distinguished leaders into accepting her plan, which was designed to their own detriment. She peddled her wares wrapped in pretty packages labeled better health and family planning. No one could deny the benefits of better health, being financially ready to raise children, or spacing one's children. However, the solution to the real issues affecting blacks did not lay in reducing their numbers. It lay in attacking the forces in society that hindered their progress. Most importantly, one had to discern Sanger's motive behind her push for birth control in the community. It was not an altruistic one.
Prior to 1939, Sanger's outreach to the black community was largely limited to her Harlem clinic and speaking at black churches.35 Her vision for the reproductive practices of black Americans expanded after the January 1939 merger of the Clinical Research Bureau and the American Birth Control League to form the Birth Control Federation of America. She selected Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, of the soap-manufacturing company Procter and Gamble, to be the BCFA regional director of the South.
Gamble wrote a memorandum in November 1939 entitled Suggestions for the Negro Project, in which he recognized that black leaders might regard birth control as an extermination plot. He suggested black leaders be placed in positions where it would appear they were in charge.36 Yet Sanger's reply reflects Gamble's ambivalence about having blacks in authoritative positions:
Another project director lamented:
Sanger knew blacks were a religious peopleand how useful ministers would be to her project. She wrote in the same letter:
Sanger's cohorts within the BCFA sought to attract black leadership. They succeeded. The list of black leaders who made up BCFA's National Advisory Council reads like a who's who among black Americans. To name a few:40
Even with this impressive list, Sanger ran into resistance when she tried to present a birth control exhibit at the 1940 American Negro Exposition, a fair that traces the progress blacks have made since the Emancipation Proclamation, in Chicago. After inviting the BCFA to display its exhibit, the Exposition's board later cancelled, citing last minute changes in floor space.41
Sanger did not buy this and issued a statement urging public protest. This has come as a complete surprise, said Sanger, since the Federation undertook preparation of the exhibit upon an express invitation from a member of the Exposition board.42 She said the cancellation resulted from concerted action on the part of representatives of the Roman Catholic Church. She even accused the church of threatening officials with the withholding of promised federal and state funds needed to hold the Exposition.43
Her statement mentioned BCFA prepared the exhibit in consultation with its National (Negro) Advisory Council, and it illustrated the need for birth control as a public health measure.44 She said the objective was to demonstrate how birth control would improve the welfare of the Negro population, noting the maternal death rate among black mothers was nearly 50 percent higher, and the child death rate was more than one-third greater than the white community.45
At Sanger's urging, protesters of the cancellation sent letters to Attorney Wendall E. Green, vice chairman of the Afra-Merican Emancipation Exposition Commission (sponsor of the Exposition), requesting he investigate. Green denied there was any threat or pressure to withhold funds needed to finance the Exposition. Further, he said the Exposition commission (of Illinois) unanimously passed a resolution, which read in part: That in the promotion, conduct and accomplishment of the objectives (of the Exposition) there must be an abiding spirit to create goodwill toward all people.46 He added that since the funds for the Exposition came from citizens of all races and creeds, any exhibit in conflict with the known convictions of any religious group contravenes the spirit of the resolution,47 which seemed to support Catholic opposition. The commission upheld the ban on the exhibit.
The propaganda of the Negro Project was that birth control meant better health. So on this premise, the BCFA designed two southern Negro Project demonstration programs to show how medically-supervised birth control integrated into existing public health services could improve the general welfare of Negroes, and to initiate a nationwide educational program.48
The BCFA opened the first clinic at the Bethlehem Center in urban Nashville, Tennessee (where blacks constituted only 25 percent of the population), on February 13, 1940. They extended the work to the Social Services Center of Fisk University (a historically black college) on July 23, 1940. This location was especially significant because of its proximity to Meharry Medical School, which trained more than 50 percent of black physicians in the United States.49
An analysis of the income of the Nashville group revealed that no family, regardless of size, had an income over $15 a week. The service obviously reached the income group for which it was designed,50 indicating the project's target. The report claimed to have brought to light serious diseases and making possible their treatment, ... [and] that 55 percent [354 of the 638] of the patients prescribed birth control methods used it consistently and successfully.51 However, the report presented no definite figures ... to demonstrate the extent of community improvement.52
The BCFA opened the second clinic on May 1, 1940, in rural Berkeley County, South Carolina, under the supervision of Dr. Robert E. Seibels, chairman of the Committee on Maternal Welfare of the South Carolina Medical Association.53 BCFA chose this site in part because leaders in the state were particularly receptive to the experiment. South Carolina had been the second state to make child spacing a part of its state public health program after a survey of the state's maternal deaths showed that 25 percent occurred among mothers known to be physically unfit for pregnancy.54 Again, the message went out: Birth controlnot better prenatal carereduced maternal and infant mortality.
Although Berkeley County's population was 70 percent black, the clinic received criticism that members of this group were overwhelmingly in the majority.55 Seibels assured Claude Barnett that this was not the case. We have ... simply given our help to those who were willing to receive it, and these usually are Negroes, he said.56
While religious convictions significantly influenced the Nashville patients' view of birth control, people in Berkeley County had no religious prejudice against birth control. But the attitude that treatment of any disease was 'against nature' was in the air.57 Comparing the results of the two sites, it is seen that the immediate receptivity to the demonstration was at the outset higher in the rural area.58 However, the final total success was lower [in the rural area]. However, in Berkeley, stark poverty was even more in evidence, and bad roads, bad weather and ignorance proved powerful counter forces [to the contraceptive programs]. After 18 months, the Berkeley program closed.59
The report indicated that, contrary to expectations, the lives of black patients serviced by the clinics did not improve dramatically from birth control. Two beliefs stood in the way: Some blacks likened birth control to abortion and others regarded it as inherently immoral.60 However, when thrown against the total pictures of the awareness on the part of Negro leaders of the improved conditions, ... and their opportunities to even better conditions under Planned Parenthood, ... the obstacles to the program are greatly outweighed, said Dr. Dorothy Ferebee.61
A hint of eugenic flavor seasoned Ferebee's speech: The future program [of Planned Parenthood] should center around more education in the field through the work of a professional Negro worker, because those of us who believe that the benefits of Planned Parenthood as a vital key to the elimination of human waste must reach the entire population [emphasis added].62 She peppered her speech with the importance of Negro professionals, fully integrated into the staff, ... who could interpret the program and objectives to [other blacks] in the normal course of day-to-day contacts; could break down fallacious attitudes and beliefs and elements of distrust; could inspire the confidence of the group; and would not be suspect of the intent to eliminate the race [emphasis added].63
Sanger even managed to lure the prominentbut hesitantblack minister J. T. Braun, editor in chief of the National Baptist Convention's Sunday School Publishing Board in Nashville, Tennessee, into her deceptive web. Braun confessed to Sanger that the very idea of such a thing [birth control] has always held the greatest hatred and contempt in my mind. ... I am hesitant to give my full endorsement of this idea, until you send me, perhaps, some more convincing literature on the subject.64 Sanger happily complied. She sent Braun the Federal Council of Churches' Marriage and Home Committee pamphlet praised by Bishop Sims (another member of the National Advisory Council), assuring him that: There are some people who believe that birth control is an attempt to dictate to families how many children to have. Nothing could be further from the truth.65
Sanger's assistants gave Braun more pro-birth control literature and a copy of her autobiography, which he gave to his wife to read. Sanger's message of preventing maternal and infant mortality stirred Braun's wife. Now convinced of this need, Braun permitted a group of women to use his chapel for a birth-control talk.66 [I was] moved by the number of prominent [black] Christians backing the proposition, Braun wrote in a letter to Sanger.67 At first glance I had a horrible shock to the proposition because it seemed to me to be allied to abortion, but after thought and prayer, I have concluded that especially among many women, it is necessary both to save the lives of mothers and children [emphasis added].68
By 1949, Sanger had hoodwinked black America's best and brightest into believing birth control's life-saving benefits. In a monumental feat, she bewitched virtually an entire network of black social, professional and academic organizations69 into endorsing Planned Parenthood's eugenic program.70
Sanger's successful duplicity does not in any way suggest blacks were gullible. They certainly wanted to decrease maternal and infant mortality and improve the community's overall health. They wholly accepted her message because it seemed to promise prosperity and social acceptance. Sanger used their vulnerabilities and their ignorance (of her deliberately hidden agenda) to her advantage. Aside from birth control, she offered no other medical or social solutions to their adversity. Surely, blacks would not have been such willing accomplices had they perceived her true intentions. Considering the role eugenics played in the early birth control movementand Sanger's embracing of that ideologythe notion of birth control as seemingly the only solution to the problems that plagued blacks should have been much more closely scrutinized.
Planned Parenthood has gone to great lengths to repudiate the organization's eugenic origins.71 It adamantly denies Sanger was a eugenicist or racist, despite evidence to the contrary. Because Sanger stopped editing The Birth Control Review in 1929, the organization tries to disassociate her from the eugenic and racist-oriented articles published after that date. However, a summary of an address Sanger gave in 1932, which appeared in the Review that year, revealed her continuing bent toward eugenics.
In A Plan for Peace, Sanger suggested Congress set up a special department to study population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population. One of the main objectives of the Population Congress would be to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population. This would be accomplished by applying a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation [in addition to tightening immigration laws] to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.72
It's reasonable to conclude that as the leader of Planned Parenthoodeven after 1929Sanger would not allow publication of ideas she didn't support.
Sanger's defenders argue she only wanted to educate blacks about birth control's health benefits. However, she counted the very people she wanted to educate among the unfit, whose numbers needed to be restricted.
Grant presents other arguments Sanger's supporters use to refute her racist roots:73
These justifications also fail because of what Grant calls scientific racism. This form of racism is based on genes, rather than skin color or language. The issue is not 'color of skin' or 'dialect of tongue,' Grant writes, but 'quality of genes [emphasis added].'74 Therefore, as long as blacks, Jews and Hispanics demonstrate 'a good quality gene pool'as long as they 'act white and think white'then they are esteemed equally with Aryans. As long as they are, as Margaret Sanger said, 'the best of their race,' then they can be [counted] as valuable citizens [emphasis added]. By the same token, individual whites who show dysgenic traits must also have their fertility curbed right along with the other 'inferiors and undesirables.'75
In short, writes Grant, Scientific racism is an equal opportunity discriminator [emphasis added]. Anyone with a 'defective gene pool' is suspect. And anyone who shows promise may be admitted to the ranks of the elite.76
The eugenic undertone is hard to miss. As Grant rightly comments, The bottom line is that Planned Parenthood was self-consciously organized, in part, to promote and enforce White Supremacy. ... It has been from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist.77
There is no way to escape the implications, argues William L. Davis, a black financial analyst Grant quotes. When an organization has a history of racism, when its literature is openly racist, when its goals are self-consciously racial, and when its programs invariably revolve around race, it doesn't take an expert to realize that the organization is indeed racist.78
It is impossible to sever Planned Parenthood's past from its present. Its legacy of lies and propaganda continues to infiltrate the black community. The poison is even more venomous because, in addition to birth control, Planned Parenthood touts abortion as a solution to the economic and social problems that plague the community. In its wake is the loss of more than 12 million lives within the black community alone. Planned Parenthood's own records reflect this. For example, a 1992 report revealed that 23.2 percent of women who obtained abortions at its affiliates were black79although blacks represent no more than 13 percent of the total population. In 1996, Planned Parenthood's research arm reported: Blacks, who make up 14 percent of all childbearing women, have 31 percent of all abortions and whites, who account for 81 percent of women of childbearing age, have 61 percent.80
Abortion is the number-one killer of blacks in America, says Rev. Hunter of LEARN. We're losing our people at the rate of 1,452 a day. That's just pure genocide. There's no other word for it. [Sanger's] influence and the whole mindset that Planned Parenthood has brought into the black community ... say it's okay to destroy your people. We bought into the lie; we bought into the propaganda.81
Some blacks have even made abortion rights synonymous with civil rights.
We're destroying the destiny and purpose of others who should be here, Hunter laments. Who knows the musicians we've lost? Who knows the great leaders the black community has really lost? Who knows what great minds of economic power people have lost? What great teachers? He recites an old African proverb: No one knows whose womb holds the chief.82
Hunter has personally observed the vestiges of Planned Parenthood's eugenic past in the black community today. When I travel around the country ... I can only think of one abortion clinic [I've seen] in a predominantly white neighborhood. The majority of clinics are in black neighborhoods.83
Hunter noted the controversy that occurred two years ago in Louisiana involving school-based health clinics. The racist undertone could not have been more evident. In the Baton Rouge district, officials were debating placing clinics in the high schools. Black state representative Sharon Weston Broome initially supported the idea. She later expressed concern about clinics providing contraceptives and abortion counseling. Clinics should promote abstinence, she said.84 Upon learning officials wanted to put the clinics in black schools only, Hunter urged her to suggest they be placed in white schools as well. At Broome's suggestion, however, proposals for the school clinics were dropped immediately, reported Hunter.
Grant observed the same game plan 20 years ago. During the 1980s when Planned Parenthood shifted its focus from community-based clinics to school-based clinics, it again targeted inner-city minority neighborhoods, he writes.85 Of the more than 100 school-based clinics that have opened nationwide in the last decade [1980s], none has been at substantially all-white schools, he adds. None has been at suburban middle-class schools. All have been at black, minority or ethnic schools.86
In 1987, a group of black ministers, parents and educators filed suit against the Chicago Board of Education. They charged the city's school-based clinics with not only violating the state's fornication laws, but also with discrimination against blacks. The clinics were a calculated, pernicious effort to destroy the very fabric of family life [between] black parents and their children, the suit alleged.87
One of the parents in the group was shocked when her daughter came home from school with Planned Parenthood material. I never realized how racist those people were until I read the [information my daughter received] at the school clinic, she said. [They are worse than] the Klan ... because they're so slick and sophisticated. Their bigotry is all dolled up with statistics and surveys, but just beneath the surface it's as ugly as apartheid.88
A more recent account uncovered a Planned Parenthood affiliate giving condoms to residents of a poor black neighborhood in Akron, Ohio.89 The residents received a promotional bag containing, among other things: literature on sexually transmitted disease prevention, gynecology exams and contraception, a condom-case key chain containing a bright-green condom, and a coupon. The coupon was redeemable at three Ohio county clinics for a dozen condoms and a $5 McDonald's gift certificate. All the items were printed with Planned Parenthood phone numbers.
The affiliate might say they're targeting high-pregnancy areas, but their response presumes destructive behavior on the part of the targeted group. Planned Parenthood has always been reluctant to promote, or encourage, abstinence as the only safeguard against teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, calling it unrealistic.
Rev. Richard Welch, president of Human Life International in Front Royal, Virginia, blasted the affiliate for targeting low-income, minority neighborhoods with the bags. He said the incident revealed the racism inherent in promoting abortion and contraception in primarily minority neighborhoods.90
He then criticized Planned Parenthood: Having sprung from the racist dreams of a woman determined to apply abortion and contraception to eugenics and ethnic cleansing, Planned Parenthood remains true to the same strategy today.91
Black leaders have been silent about Margaret Sanger's evil machination against their community far too long. They've been silent about abortion's devastating effects in their communitydespite their pro-life inclination. The majority of [blacks] are more pro-life than anything else, said Hunter.92 Blacks were never taught to destroy their children; even in slavery they tried to hold onto their children.
Blacks are not quiet about the issue because they do not care, but rather because the truth has been kept from them. The issue is ... to educate our people, said former Planned Parenthood board member LaVerne Tolbert.93
Today, a growing number of black pro-lifers are untangling the deceptive web spun by Sanger. They are using truth to shed light on the lies. The Say So march is just one example of their burgeoning pro-life activism. As the marchers laid 1,452 roses at the courthouse stepsto commemorate the number of black babies aborted dailyspokesman Damon Owens said, This calls national attention to the problem [of abortion]. This is an opportunity for blacks to speak to other blacks. This doesn't solve all of our problems. But we will not solve our other problems with abortion.
Black pro-lifers are also linking arms with their white pro-life brethren. Black Americans for Life (BAL) is an outreach group of the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), a Washington, D.C.-based grassroots organization. NRLC encourages networking between black and white pro-lifers. Our goal is to bring people togetherfrom all races, colors, and religionsto work on pro-life issues, said NRLC Director of Outreach Ernest Ohlhoff.94 Black Americans for Life is not a parallel group; we want to help African-Americans integrate communicational and functionally into the pro-life movement.
Mrs. Beverly LaHaye, founder and chairman of Concerned Women for America, echoes the sentiment. Our mission is to protect the right to life of all members of the human race. CWA welcomes like-minded women and men, from all walks of life, to join us in this fight.
Concerned Women for America has a long history of fighting Planned Parenthood's evil agenda. The Negro Project is an obscure angle, but one that must come to light. Margaret Sanger sold black Americans an illusion. Now with the veil of deception removed, they can choose life ... that [their] descendants may live.
Read more here:
Posted in Eugenics
Comments Off on The Negro Project and Margaret Sanger
THE Margaret Sanger
Posted: at 3:08 pm
Abortion clinics were originally set up with the intention of slowing the population growth of Afro-Americans and others racial groups considered mentally or otherwise inferior.
Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood is the major force behind the abortion and pro-choice/abortion movement in America. If you are proud of being pro-choice, you should know more about the most responsible person for the pro-abortion-rights movement and abortion industry in the 20th century.
"Lothrop Stoddard was on the board of directors (of Margaret Sanger's Population Association of America) for years.... He had an interview with Adolf Hitler and was very impressed. His book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, was written while he served on Sanger's board. Havelock Ellis, one of Sanger's extra-marital lovers, reviewed this..book favorably in The Birth Control Review".
At a March,1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.
Margaret Sanger's beliefs about social works of charity are revealing: She criticized the success-- not failure-- of charity... She called for the halt to the medical care being given to slum mothers, and decried the expense to the taxpayers of monies being spent on the deaf, blind and dependent. She condemned foreign missionaries for reducing the infant mortality rates in developing countries, and declared charity to be more evil than for the assistance it provided to the poor and needy. Sanger's thinking moved to fascism in an elitist attitude that presumes to judge who is worthy to live and to die.
"Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in America. 78% of their clinics are in minority communities. Blacks make up 12% of the population, but 35% of the abortions in America. Are they being targeted? Isn't that genocide? We are the only minority in America that is on the decline in population. If the current trend continues, by 2038 the black vote will be insignificant. Did you know that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a devout racist who created the Negro Project designed to sterilize unknowing black women and others she deemed as undesirables of society? The founder of Planned Parenthood said, "Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated." Is her vision being fulfilled today?" quoted from blackgenocide.org
Adolf Hitler - Fuehrer of Nazi Germany "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring. . . represents the most humane act of mankind." Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. 10 from Hitler and Eugenics
Margaret Sanger - Founder of Planned Parenthood ". . .we prefer the policy of immediate sterilizarion, of making sure that parenthood is ' absolutely prohibited ' to the feeble-minded." The Pivot of Civilization, p102
"Can two walk together, except they be agreed?" Amos 3:3
Now: The preborn child is often targeted for death if tests show that it may have a physical or mental handicap. The American eugenics program has no central sponsor but does have several large advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood, NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) and the National Abortion Federation.
"In the past few years there has been a frantic effort on the part of Planned Parenthood ideologues to revise their own history. Much of the effort has been waged in an attempt to distance the organization and it's founder, Margaret Sanger, from charges of radical racial bigotry. Mike Richmond draws from a selection of authors to demonstrate that Sanger and Planned Parenthood are rooted in eugenics, and have earned a despised place in history along with Adolf Hitler and the German Third Reich were." from "Life Advocate, Jan.-Feb., 1998, Vol. XII, Number 10,
Another link between Margaret Sanger, American Eugenicist and Adolf Hitler, Eugenics practitioner: "The leaders in the German sterilization movement state repeatedly that their legislation was formulated after careful study of the California experiment as reported by Mr. Gosney and Dr. [Paul] Popenoe. It would have been impossible, they say, to undertake such a venture involving some 1 million people without drawing heavily upon previous experience elsewhere." Who is Dr. Paul Popenoe? He was a leader in the U.S. eugenics movement and wrote (1933) the article 'Eugenic Sterilization' in the journal (BCR) that Margaret Sanger started. How many Americans did Dr. Popenoe estimate should be subjected to sterilization? Between five million and ten million Americans. "The situation [in the U.S.A] will grow worse instead of better if steps are not taken to control the reproduction of mentally handicapped. Eugenic sterilization represents one such step that is practicable, humanitarian, and certain in its results."
from
First, put into action President Wilson's fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918.
Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of individuals. The main objects of the Population Congress would be:
a. to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.
b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.
c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.
d. to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
e. to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.
f. to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their ( another Pro-Choice) choice of segregation or sterilization.
g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons (sounds like a return to the plantation for a life of slavery) where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.
The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.
The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct.
Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense---defending the unborn against their own disabilities.
The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers' health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives---thus reducing maternal mortality.
The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.
With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates (Sanger was known for her attitudes on free sex, adultery and abortion. Under this provision, Ms. Sanger's sexual profligacy and pro-abortion - murder of the unborn- would have placed Sanger, herself, into this category) segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace.
There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.
In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace.
"Summary of address before the New History Society", January 17th, New York City
Highlights in red inserted by website author.
Margaret Sanger, Sterilization, and the Swastika by Mike Richmond Good assessment of Sanger's beliefs and the affect of her influence
See the article here:
Posted in Eugenics
Comments Off on THE Margaret Sanger