Charles Kuralt’s Dad Was Involved In NC Eugenics Program

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An interesting article in the Charlotte Observer outlines how Wallace Kuralt, father of longtime CBS newsman Charles Kuralt, led Mecklenburg County to sterilize the larger number of people than any other county in North Carolina's infamous eugenics program.

Compassionate. Visionary. A champion of women and the poor.

That's the reputation that Wallace Kuralt built as Mecklenburg County's welfare director from 1945 to 1972. Today, the building where Charlotte's poor come for help bears his name – a name made even more prominent when his newscaster son, Charles Kuralt, rose to fame.

But as architect of Mecklenburg's program of eugenic sterilization – state-ordered surgery to stop the poor and disabled from bearing children – Kuralt helped write one of the most shameful chapters of North Carolina history.

The Charlotte Observer has obtained records sealed by the state that tell the stories of 403 Mecklenburg residents ordered sterilized by the N.C. Eugenics Board at the behest of Kuralt's welfare department.

It's a number that dwarfs the total from any other county, in a state that ran one of the nation's most active efforts to sterilize the mentally ill, mentally retarded and epileptic.

Read more: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2011/09/26/2637820/wallace-kuralts-era-of-sterilization.html#ixzz1Z4FbwoS0

 

She Makes a Good Point

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I’ve liked Elizabeth Warren since I saw her in a documentary about the credit card industry.  She makes a lot of sense a lot of the time.  If you watch this short clip I think you’ll find what she says to make a lot of sense, but if you’re like me you’ll recognize that in the end she leaves one large question unanswered: “How big a chunk should the successful factory owner pay forward?”  Watch the video and you’ll know what I’m referring to.

Like I said I don’t think anyone, well at least anyone who’s semi-adult and reasonable, will dispute that the successful factory owner didn’t get that way on his own and benefited from the many resources provided by our society and that the factory owner needs to “pay it forward.” I do think, however, that many semi-adult and reasonable people can and will disagree quite vehemently as to HOW MUCH the factory owner should pay forward.

Ethics are important?

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Every class, seminar, training session, etc. I've attended that's had the subject of ethics has seen an almost instant mental "check out" of all the attendees.  It seems to be one of those subjects that everyone acknowledges as important but also as unnecessary to discuss.  You're either ethical or you're not, what's there to discuss?

Well, when you see stories like this you realize there's a whole LOT to discuss:

According to the Post, the groundwork has been laid "for scientific advances that would allow drones to search for a human target and then make an identification based on facial-recognition or other software. Once a match was made, a drone could launch a missile to kill the target."

Of course, at some point a human would have to decide what information the drones would be given — presumably, for instance, the data to be used to identify the individuals it might target.

But as the Post adds, "the prospect of machines able to perceive, reason and act in unscripted environments presents a challenge to the current understanding of international humanitarian law."

Here's a link to the Washington Post story that is referenced in the quote.

The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do

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Mark Cuban says the most patriotic thing you can do is "Bust your ass and get rich." More:

I’m not against government involvement in times of need. I am for recognizing that  big public companies will  continue to cut jobs in an effort to prop up stock prices, which in turn stimulates the need for more government involvement.  Every cut job by the big companies extracts a cost on the American people in one way or another.

Entrepreneurs are needed to create and grow companies to absorb those people in new jobs. If entrepreneurs don’t create those jobs, the government ends up having to spend more money to help them one way or another…

In these times of “The Great Recession” we shouldn’t be trying to shift the benefits of wealth behind some curtain. We should be celebrating and encouraging people to make as much money as they can. Profits equal tax money. While some people might find it distasteful to pay taxes. I don’t. I find it Patriotic.

I’m not saying that the government’s use of tax money is the most efficient use of our hard-earned capital. It obviously is not. In a perfect world, there would be a better option. We don’t live in a perfect world. We don’t live in a perfect time. We live in a time where the government plays a big role in an effort to help lead us out this Great Recession. That’s reality.

So I will repeat my point. Get out there and make a boatload of money. Enjoy the shit out your money. Pay your taxes.

It’s the most Patriotic thing you can do.

Why We May Not Be Downsizing Any Time Soon

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There are a couple of reasons my wife and I aren't even thinking about selling our house and moving into a smaller place in a few years when the kids are all shipped off to college.  One is that we don't think we, or anyone else for that matter, will be able to sell our house for quite a few years.  In a word the real estate market still sucks in our neck of the woods.

A second reason we probably shouldn't count on downsizing can be found in this article about the slide of the median household income in America to 1996 levels:

As families struggle to make ends meet and young workers navigate the moribund labor market, many have turned to each other. According to the Census report, 5.9 million Americans between 25 and 34, or 14.2% of that group, lived with their parents in spring 2011, compared with 4.7 million before the recession, or 11.8%.

I love my kids, but there's no way I could stand living with them in close quarters which means I'm going to want to keep all the space I can.  On the positive side I'll be charging them rent so I might as well give them a little space in exchange for whatever dollars they might earn while working shoulder-to-shoulder at Taco Bell with the other college grads being sucked into our blackhole of an economy.

$22.54 Here, $22.54 There, Next Thing You Know You’re Talking Serious Money

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Rick Perry caught a lot of flack for calling Social Security a Ponzi Scheme, which is just a tad dramatic but still provides the helpful service of putting the Social Security issue on the table for discussion. I thought of this as I read the always interesting Now I Know and came across this little tidbit of info:

The first person to receive Social Security benefits was a lady by the name of Ida May Fuller, who retired in 1939 at the age of 65, and received her first check — for $22.54 — on  January 31, 1940.  Fuller had worked for three years under the Social Security system, so she had made some contributions to the overall fund, but only $24.75 worth.  She came out ahead by the time she cashed her second benefits check — the second of very, very many.  Fuller lived to be 100, passing away on January 31, 1975, thirty five years to the day she received that $22.54.  Her total lifetime Social Security benefits?  $22,888.92.

Personally I've always assumed that the baby boomers screwed the rest of us out of our benefits a long time ago, so I'm on my own to figure out how to live to 100 while staying gainfully employed.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

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I've been watching with interest the developing marriage amendment story here in North Carolina:

North Carolina voters will decide in the May 2012 primary whether to add an amendment to the state constitution that bans legal recognition of same-sex marriages, after a 30-16 vote Tuesday in the stateSenate in favor of a referendum.

The state House approved the vote by a 75-42 vote Monday. Votes in both the House and Senate were more than the three-fifths margin required to send the issue to the voters.

Supporters and opponents of the marriage amendment say they expect to be busy trying to persuade people between now and next spring.

I'm personally against the amendment, and in fact I have some pretty strong feelings about the appropriate role for government in defining relationships at all, so you can safely assume that I'll vote against the amendment. You can also safely assume that a great number of people, including the amendment's supporters, assume that I'm in the minority here in North Carolina and so they feel confident that they'll get the amendment passed. It's also probably a safe assumption you'll hear at least some of the amendment supporters say something to the effect of "Well, most people here are straight and are good Christians and believe that a real marriage is only between a man and a woman.  Since we're the majority we should be able to say that marriage is only rightly between a man and a woman.  That's our right in our democratic system – majority rules."

That last statement opens up a lot of arguments (equal rights/protections for minority groups, the proper role of religion in public policy, etc.) that would take about 800 pages to dig into and I'll save that for another day.  I will, however, tell you that I'm always made uncomfortable by that argument because it uses the same logic that has been used to oppress people in the minority throughout our history. I will also tell you that I'm far more concerned with the state of our economy than with the fact that Harry might marry Barry.  

I'd really rather not have our leaders play the marriage fiddle while tens of thousands of our citizens suffer through high unemployment and soaring rates of hunger and poverty in a burning Rome. (See Nero Fiddling While Rome Burns).

On a more fundamental level I'll also tell you that I will vote against the amendment because I don't happen to think that if someone is gay there's something wrong with them. I don't think being gay is something that a person can, or should, be cured of, and I find any law that singles out our gay fellow citizens and treats them as a second class citizen to be a stain on our society.  Just wanted to make that clear.