The Real Thing To Be Thankful For

Ok....a quick review...we all know the story…..


On September 6th, 1620, the Mayflower left Plymouth, England. The second part of the voyage was stormy, but finally, on November 11th, the ship anchored off of Cape Cod. The members of the Mayflower spent over six weeks exploring different location to find an appropriate one to settle. On December 21st the Pilgrims made their first landfall at Plymouth Harbor.

The Pilgrims established a settlement at what had been an abandoned Indian village known as Patuxet. There were a limited number of houses that first winter in New Plymouth. Many of the colonists were forced to stay on the Mayflower. Half of the settlers died that first winter. William Bradford became the governor of colony, after the death of John Carver in 1621. The colony grew slowly and eventually became part of the much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The Native Americans who they met were very friendly. The settlers entered into an alliance with them. When spring came, the colonists, with help from the natives planted the native corn crop. By the time the second fall came around, the colonists harvested a bountiful crop of corn, along with other crops. To celebrate that crop yield the colonists had a feast. Thus began the tradition of Thanksgiving.

Now here is what REALLY happened.


From the beginning the Pilgrims planned their farming economy as a collective. Work and the land was to be shared and the produce of that work and land was to be distributed equally.

And guess what…THEY STARVED!


Some of the settlers pretended to be sick to avoid working on the communal farm.  Even though they were religious people materials turned up stolen.  They could not produce enough to support themselves.  There was famine.  And they kept it up for TWO YEARS!

Gov. William Bradford wrote in his diary. "So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented." He said they, "began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.

At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."


TA! DA!!! Our founding colonists of Plymouth turned from socialism to private farming!


"This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many."

The result was they had enough food for the first Thanksgiving held in November 1623.


 Aristotle said, "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."


In other words…people make less effort when the return is the same no matter what effort you exert.

If all is held in a common pocket... and everyone can take from it despite what is contributed... then many are quite willing to freeload.   Humans will take as much as they can and do as little as possible for it. Eventually you end up with an empty pocket.

When effort is connected to rewards more is produced. Add a free market and people start to trade what they have left over for other things their neighbors have.

 Free exchange for benefit and a community grows , thrives….AND DOES NOT STARVE!


Even better…guarantee that the rights of property are secure.   Then people risk....

 and invent,

and invest in others......!!!

When our first colonists turned their backs on collectivism they survived.  And, with that decision took the first steps toward becoming American ….something for which we should all be truly thankful.

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT!

Let's pretend a new theory has emerged from the WORLD OF SCIENCE.

 It says that something BAD is coming but SCIENCE can show us how to avoid it.


EVERYBODY climbs on board to help spread THE WORD. Celebrities and politicians, famous scientists and activists from other fields all profess its validity. Foundations fund research. The great universities study and teach it. This theory is reported upon almost daily by the media. Our children learn about it in school.

Leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill all proclaim its value. Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, rule in favor of this theory.

Alexander Graham Bell completely supports it. So does Margaret Sanger. Writers like George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells expound on it. The founder of Stanford University considers this theory worthy of research. Nobel Prize winners back it and foundations like Carnegie and Rockefeller fund the research.


Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Johns Hopkins participate in exploring the theory. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute is built just to research it. And legislation concerning the theory is passed across the country.


The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council all support this theory.


 All this continues for over 50 years. Very few people object to or question the theory and those who do are denigrated. They are called ignorant and reactionary.

What is the theory? It is called EUGENICS.   It is real....it has an horrific history... and America dominated the field.


Eugenics developed from the determination that something was seriously wrong with the human gene pool which would result in our rapid deterioration. We were being out bred by the inferior. The inferior being defined as the “feeble-minded”, Jews, degenerates, immigrants….anyone deemed unfit by pretty much any definition.

Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-nine states.

Progressive Era Americans adopted the ideas of Sir Francis Galton, a British scientist who coined the term in 1883. He was the cousin of Charles Darwin.


In 1869, Galton published a study of genetics titled “Hereditary Genius,” which revealed collected data concerning 1000 upper-class British citizens. The data basically proved nothing more than that wealthy people had more advantages and were often better educated than poorer ones. However, Galton, thought that his study proved wealthy people were genetically superior.

 Democracy was therefore radically flawed; the belief that all people were created equal was a fallacy. Sterilizing the poor would create a race of supermen and women, eventually resulting in a perfect society. Galton wrote that poor people who had children were enemies of the state and should not receive any charitable assistance whatsoever.

He came up with a fancy name for his pseudoscience: “eugenics.” The inferior class was termed “cacogenic” (poorly born).

Galton concluded that it was possible to produce "a highly gifted race of men" by the process of selective breeding, which he later termed "positive" eugenics. Discouraging the reproduction of "undesirables" was subsequently termed "negative" eugenics. The “negative” eugenics movement was much stronger than the “positive” eugenics and swept across the U.S. People were worried about the immigration of inferior races early in the twentieth century --- "dangerous human pests" who represented "the rising tide of imbeciles" and who were polluting the best of the human race.”

It did not take long for those interested in eugenics and those concerned about immigration to combine forces. Those deemed FEEBLE-MINDED were Jews, various foreigners, and blacks. It was considered imperative to stop them from breeding either by isolation or sterilization.




Sanger

 The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, said, "Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty ... there is not greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles." She was concerned about the burden of caring for "this dead weight of human waste."


Famous author, H.G. Wells, was not in favor of "ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens."


Theodore Roosevelt told people, "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind."


"I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them... The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed..."

Playwright, George Bernard Shaw said, “The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else."

The improvement of humankind was the ultimate goal. Eugenics attracted the most liberal and progressive minds of the generation.


Cold Springs Harbor Institute



John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Mary Harriman rushed to found the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island in order to collect information on the cacogenic population. Harvard biologist Charles Davenport, director, of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Springs Harbor, received huge grants from the Carnegie Foundation to research family histories and determine who was “unfit” and “defective.” These generally included recent immigrants, criminals, and the mentally ill as well as paupers and street people.


Davenport concluded that 5.76 million Americans needed to be sterilized. Using seriously flawed models based on preconceived notions of Mendel’s laws of heredity, he explained that certain Americans were more likely to possess and produce specific types of defective genes. Immigrants from Italy and Hungary were predisposed to commit assault and rape, whereas Jewish citizens had clear inherited propensities for larceny and prostitution.

In 1926, an American Eugenics Society was founded; its main goal was to inform the public of the disastrous consequences of the unchecked breeding of cacogenics. Schools and state fairs were flooded with eugenics programs. Some ministers, educators, and early feminists like Margaret Sanger and Victoria Woodhull passionately espoused eugenic principles.

Twenty-nine American states passed laws allowing sterilization with California being the most enthusiastic.



YEA!


Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.


Once the state of Georgia had accepted eugenics theory, one doctor had performed tubal ligations on women who had more than three children without their knowledge or consent. A distinguished Georgian prosecutor later called him “an advanced thinker, ahead of his time.”


The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.

 In Buck v. Bell (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law authorizing compulsory sterilization of the mentally challenged. Writing for the 8-1 majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stated that society should “prevent those that are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

In a moment of Supreme Court callousness surpassed only by the infamous Dred Scott decision, Justice Holmes curtly noted, 
 "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough."




Two major foundations, Carnegie and Rockefeller, funded eugenics research. The Rockefeller Foundation continued financing German researchers when Germany began killing people in mental institutions and were still providing funding up to just a few months before the beginning of WWII.

In 1933, Hitler called eugenics the most important medical discovery of all time. He wrote to American attorney Madison Grant, one of the founders of the American Eugenics Society, heaping him with effusive praise for his valuable contributions to society.


American eugenic ideas had been headed down the exact same path as the Nazis’. As Nobel Prize winner Dr. Alexis Carrel put it in 1935, undesirables “should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutes supplied with proper gases.”


But guess what? When World War II ended, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. The biographies of all those famous and powerful people just skimmed over those unfortunate details. Eugenics was no longer the hot subject in colleges either.

 Consider….Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory was established for the sole purpose of researching eugenics. In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established the laboratory complex on Long Island.

It stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

 Yet, there was no scientific basis for it. Nobody knew what a gene really was. The movement fed on terms that had no rigorous definition. "Feeble-mindedness"? “Degenerate”? “Unfit”?


The eugenics movement was really a social program disguised as science. It was driven by fears about immigration, race, and any other perceived undesirable people moving into the country.

The golden age of eugenics-proper lasted from about 1883 through WWII. The goal was the production of better, faster, stronger, smarter, disease and handicap free, more human-than-human populations.

Eugenics proponents believed that the poor and sickly were genetically inferior by nature and thus had no right to procreate. Indeed, the most hardcore eugenicists believed that the lower socioeconomic classes had no right to life at all.

Eugenics, in reality, is a system of state control– where reproduction must be guided by "wise men" of one brand or another. This system leads, ultimately, again and again to control by elites who seek god-like powers and total social control.

 Even, up to the present date, abortion is considered by many as an acceptable means of eliminating the UNDESIRABLE in the gene pool. In addition, futurists, transhumanists, and government policy makers look to an age where race-specific weapons are possible and mass death is conceivable and desirable for some of those in control.

Elite control and systematic death–








Another golden moment in the American Progressive Era.

Witt's End

I recently received my first dental crown. I consider it a miracle of dental art. It sits back there on my bottom left molar, shining like a diamond, working like a real tooth.

 Dentistry has advanced greatly in the last 50 years.

Return with me to the past….circa 1959… and meet the dentist of my childhood…Dr. DeWitt (his name must be said with a drop in vocal tone of about 2 octaves.)


Starting from the age of about 10 my mother would drop me off at his office for my check-up while she ran errands. Slowly, I would open the car door ….”screwing my courage to the sticking place” and alone, step into the abyss. My mother never had a clue.

Dr. DeWitt’s (octaves) office was on the 2nd floor of an old brownstone building. I entered through wood and glass doors to be confronted by a dark, narrow staircase.

Nobody else ever seemed to be on the stairs. I would climb the stairs slowly …one by one…knowing Dr. DeWitt (octaves), awaited me, in the dark…. at the top.







His office door was on the left. His reception area was right out of a 1940’s detective movie….transom above the door….receptionist (in a nurse’s uniform) at a large oak desk….chairs of chocolate brown wood with green leathery upholstery.

I always had to sit and wait….I felt that this was by design. My fear became exquisite.


Then the nurse(?) arose from the desk and would say DR. DeWITT (octaves) WILL SEE YOU NOW.

 I was led into the laBORatory. It had a dental chair surrounded by metal pulls that all seemed to contain sharp points. The chair faced a large bay window with a view to the street below.

Around the edges of the room were white metal cabinets with skinny drawers that hid INSTRUMENTS.

The nurse (?) would place me in THE CHAIR, clip a paper bib around me, and then step to the side ….




Enter… Dr Dewitt (octaves)!




He was old (at least 40) and he always dressed in a uniform that was the same kind of lab tunic worn by mad scientists and Dr. Kildare.

Dr. DeWitt (octaves) greeted me in the same manner every time…”Hello little missy” (octaves)


With my heart pumping in my throat…all I could do was squeak.


The nurse (?) tipped the chair back and Dr. DeWitt (octaves) would begin pumping on a pedal with his foot to raise me up closer…closer…closer.

He had a light that he would swing around my head and he wore goggles that would put a Swiss army knife to shame.

“Open the mouth nice and wide now little missy (octaves)”.


He placed THE SUCKER under my tongue…..Although it did not hurt… it made a continual disturbing DRAIN sound.


And then….the nurse(?) handed him THE INSTRUMENTS of his trade: The POKER, THE SCRAPER, and THE EXTENDO MIRROR.

 

I remember having a very close up view of his nostrils.

 The extendo mirror perused my mouth and then…..THE POKER. Poke on this tooth, poke on that tooth…throat clearing…lots of HMMMM’s and whimpering (from me).


I had learned that when THE POKER stuck somewhere I was in trouble because that would require THE NEEDLE, THE DRILL and mercury laced silver..

The worst was THE SCRAPER. Dr. DeWitt (octaves) was also the DENTAL HYGIENIST. The nurse (?) was just THE INSTRUMENT dispenser. He LIKED the scraper, and, he was very thorough in its application.

Scrape….scrape…He seemed to have a telepathic connection with the nurse (?) because with no verbal cue she would hand him THE POKER. Poke…poke …poke…!






Sticking!!!! And then Dr. DeWitt (octaves) would say something like, “Little hole there little missy…..we’ll have to TAKE CARE of THAT…I’ll tell your mother to make ANOTHER appointment…let’s brush those teeth up and give you a squirt of candy water (red dye #2 mouth wash)”.

And while the ROTARY BRUSH whirled around my teeth all I could hear was the echo in my brain…ANOTHER APPOINTMENT…A LITTLE HOLE…… Dr DeWitt (octaves) gleefully holding THE NEEDLE and THE DRILL…..

Once sufficiently brushed, drained, and liberally candy watered the nurse (?) lowered the chair, unclipped the bib, and told me I could leave. I usually had to place my head between my knees for a few seconds…this appeared to ANNOY Dr. DeWitt (octaves) as he always said “Now that wasn’t so bad…WAS IT?” (octaves)

 I was released into the custody of my mother who chatted cozily with my torturer while ANOTHER APPOINTMENT was made.




As I turned to follow her down the dark narrow stairs I heard Dr. DeWitt ….

“Good-bye little missy…see you……..soon (octaves)