Is not.

Is too.

Now.

Co-workers around me are trying to work out how to ditch the filming meeting. At least I won't look slack alone. In fact, some keeners are ditching.

I'll note that historically this sterilization movement was a common way to strike at miscegenation, which is at the root of the commonly held notion in some black communities that birth control is an evil plan by whitey to breed them out. Sounds crazy now, but it pretty much was the evil plan by whitey.

Yeah, it's like on another board where someone was all HOW DARE HE when Farakkahn said the levees were breached on purpose in black neighborhoods to spare the white ones. Louis is a prick, but that was just about SOP for a long time in a lot of places.

Oh, and also (let's see if I can cut and paste this time):

Fans of the Mormon boy band Everclean were taken aback (and affront, it would seem) when they popped the video of the group's Sons of Provo into their DVD players and discovered a movie entitled Adored: Diary of a Porn Star instead, the Salt Lake City Deseret Morning News reported today (Wednesday). Deseret Book Co. told the newspaper that it had removed the film from its shelves. Apparently the mix-up occurred after the producers of Adored and Sons of Provo each hired the same Los Angeles-based company to produce the DVD copies and distribute them. "This is hugely damaging," said George Dayton, head of business affairs for HaleStorm, the company that produced Son of Provo. Although Adored was described as a "heartwarming film about a porn star" and not a porn film itself, Dayton said that it matters little "whether it's some soft-core title or whatever. ... This title doesn't lend itself to good, clean family or LDS [Church of Latter Day Saints] -centered entertainment."

I don't understand for celebs what the upside of a sex tape is, that it overrides the risk of losing it.

Me neither, unless you believe that no publicity is bad publicity.

Which, given Tom Cruise's behavior earlier this year and the box office performance of War of the Worlds, isn't unfounded.

Still, Indiana has a special relationship with the history of eugenics.

Indiana Eugenics Timeline

I really think this is the history that needs to be taught. This is when you really get how fucked up our history has been at an institutional level.

New nickel.

given Tom Cruise's behavior earlier this year and the box office performance of War of the Worlds, isn't unfounded

Well, there's no way to tell what the box office would have been without the shenanigans. It's a pretty high-profile-laden enterprise. And if the rumours that Spielberg won't work with him again are true, I think it's a bit Pyhrric.

Then there was the whole Tuskeegee experiment thing. Yeah, I can see where there's a certain level of suspicion re: mass medicine issues.

But I still think Nigerians should vaccinate for polio. Apparently some folks there think that the polio vaccines are designed to make the women sterile. Which is why Yemen is dealing with polio for the first time in years. Disease doesn't respect national borders.

1882 Richmond Indiana resident Dr. Joseph Iutzi publishes “Heredity and Its Relations to Disease,” which argues that insanity, tuberculosis, and syphilis, among other diseases, are predominantly inherited.

Hey, that's my home town! And I'd like to point out that he's two-for-three: syphilis can indeed be contracted congenitally, and was a common cause of infant disease. There's a strong genetic link for some kinds of insanity (notably schizophrenia and depression). And God knows that in 1882, you'd be noticing that entire families had tuberculosis.

New nickel.

t history-ignorant furriner Who's the dude? Same one, new angle? t /history-ignorant furriner