Lawrence M. Ludlow's blog

Are Democrats Conducting Class-Cleansing Against Small Businesses Owners?

How to Buy an Election
The state—or, to make the matter more concrete, the government—consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

  • H.L. Mencken, From the essay “Sham Battle” in Carnival of Buncombe, 1936

 
In the Soviet Union of Lenin and Stalin, a program of dekulakization destroyed an entire class of peasant farmers, called kulaks. These were the smallholders who were a bit more prosperous than the poorest of the poor who surrounded them. In some cases, they owned – gasp! – more than eight acres of land. Often, however, they simply had an extra pig or some other farm animals to feed their families. This was enough to transform them into objects of hatred for envious and malicious neighbors. During various phases of this “class-enemy” persecution, the Soviet government confiscated more than 100 million acres of land, deported nearly 2 million farmers to prisons and work-camps (often located in Siberia), and executed between 500,000 and 5 million people, depending upon whom you ask. Today, this political process, called classicide, appears to be providing inspiration for progressives and the Democratic Party faithful in the United States. So maybe the Democrats were right: We’re all Russians, now!
 

Playing to Delicate Voter Sensibilities
Is it possible that Democrats are attempting to destroy the most productive class of American voters, mollify them with payoffs and generous unemployment benefits, and create an economic calamity that can be used to win the November election? Politicians have been rigging elections for decades – often with visceral cruelty, as Robert Caro demonstrated in volume two of his biography of President Lyndon Johnson, Means of Ascent. But as dawn broke on the year 2020, the Democrats were facing a daunting challenge. The many iterations of their Russian conspiracies had fallen apart as quickly as vintage #MeToo rape allegations, and the mirage of impeachment had left them thirsty in an electoral desert that seemed to have no end. Just as bad, their presidential candidate, Joe Biden, was drowning in a bottomless soup-bowl of Ukrainian corruption – and it wasn’t borscht. So it went – until the middle of February 2020. Despite massive debt and the highly leveraged nature of an economy goosed by the Federal Reserve monetary easing and fiscal mismanagement in Congress, employment was at record highs, and minorities were deserting the Democratic Party’s plantation and becoming closet deplorables.
 
So what’s a mother to do? How do you snatch from the jaws of defeat a Democratic election-night victory that was swirling irretrievably around November 3rd like a quart of Nancy Pelosi’s ice cream around a hot black hole at the center of a red-state galaxy with an orange-man-nougat at its center? You could almost hear Rachel Maddow screaming. And Jordan Peterson had already spread the word about Soviet gulags. As a result, easily triggered college students were no longer as excited as they were in 2016 to see balaclava-wearing Antifa thugs kicking lone women in the head. No. Today’s Democrats needed a family-friendly way to eliminate class enemies. So how do you break some legs without that nasty crunching sound?
 

Bat Wings to the Rescue
Even Democrats know that job creation is dependent upon small businesses more than any other sector of the economy. And since the long-term goal of progressives is to increase the number of voters who are dependent on government income – the Yellow Brick Road toward socialism – anything that undermines widespread prosperity will do. So the appearance of the coronavirus was like pennies from heaven, but with no musical score, no Bing Crosby or Steve Martin, and no upside spiritual connection to “found money” left by angelic beings – that is, not unless you count fluttering Chinese batwings from Wuhan. Yes. The coronavirus was the crisis that wouldn’t be wasted, and today’s helicopter parents are the perfect target for a campaign based on fear. Groomed by decades of bumper-sticker philosophy, unionized public-school teachers, and textbooks created by political hacks, they were ready to quake in their booties at the drop of a wonton. And Democrats are experts at manipulating fear – with only Thomas Massie and Rand Paul among the very few Republicans fighting the giveaways and lockdown with any conviction. And in response, Democrats wield guilt like a sledgehammer. To anyone who identifies the devastating consequences of the lockdown, the retort is unanimous and shrill: You want to kill grandma! The concept of nuance died quietly at the close of the last millennium; requiescat in pace.
 
It doesn’t matter that the cure is worse than the disease. It doesn’t matter that fear of COVID-19 has left more than 30 million workers unemployed, hospitals and thousands of businesses shuttered, food-production supply chains in tatters, and tens of millions of the world’s most destitute people looking toward a bleak future of malnutrition and mass death. No. The Democrats must win in November. This election cycle is all that matters. And that means putting everyone on a government-run financial life-support machine that’s every bit as deadly as a hospital respirator wielded by Big Nurse on a bad day. By destroying the small-business kulaks of America, Democrats will destroy the most unpredictable, productive, and innovative source of economic abundance now operating. And too many Americans are buying what they’re selling – for now.
 

Is It Time for Citizen Arrests of Lockdown Governors?

And let’s not forget to do the same with their attorneys general and co-conspiring unelected health-department bureaucrats. In the year 2020, “I was just following orders” should not be a credible defense – at least not since Adolf Eichmann tried to use it during his war-criminal trial, as recorded in 1963 by Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
 
I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of capturing, confining, and bringing to trial political miscreants suffering from a perfect storm of hubris colliding with lock-downer syndrome and membership in the Covid Cult (hat tip to Tom Woods) of pseudo-science. Nonetheless, it seems that a few steps can be taken legally to end the violation of our human right to earn a living and pursue happiness. Either way, it has to stop, now.
 
Politicians such as Gretchen “The Wretched” Whitmer of Michigan are drunk with power and from force-feeding themselves gigantic gobs of their own bloated narcissism and blinkered, solipsistic views on what constitutes “relevant facts worth considering” to produce “safety.” To produce safety, which is not the primary task of government despite today’s myth-making, they’ve confined their cognitive purview to the sketchy and ever-changing notions about a novel virus. By circumscribing their empathy to a tiny circle, they have refused to consider the mental health status of people now suffering from social deprivation and suicidal ideation, the fundamental and primary value of human freedom and human agency as the hallmarks of individual rights, and the critical importance of life-sustaining economic activity as the basis for all human flourishing and life itself (and the first to be dismissed by the tax-stuffed dictators and their minions with no “skin in the game”).
 
Having acknowledged the skewed and purposely limited scope of “relevant” information worth “considering” by these authoritarians and their spiteful Jacobin supporters:

  • Why not issue a countdown deadline – a short one, like 24 hours -- on the governors and attorneys general in lockdown states, warning them to turn themselves in at a designated location or, if they want to avoid arrest by a citizen search party, immediately cease and desist from their human-rights-violating activities?
  • Why not assemble a citizens’ posse to apprehend and confine these governors in a location where they can do no further harm to anyone except themselves until a trial can be arranged – perhaps housing them in one of the nursing homes they seemed so ready to choose for others as incarceration centers?
  • Why not suspend the tax-funded paychecks of state employees who make these decisions and enforce them – at a minimum garnishing their wages to match the economic devastation they imposed on restaurateurs, gym owners, dance studios, theaters, bars, and any number of small businesses, particularly the ones that were not politically connected enough to enrich themselves on the recent helicopter money-drops or able to gain a mail-order monopoly on the sale of goods while their competitors’ doors were shuttered by colluding public officials?
  • Why not ask ourselves why people who have no financial “skin in the game” should make any decisions whatsoever that apply to those who become their political targets – whether as politicians or as spiteful voters?
  • Why not exact a punitive, prevention-oriented financial dismemberment of those who made and enforced these decisions to molest the citizenry? Like other kinds of molesters – whether sexual predators who prey on adults or child molesters, there is no data to show that those who seek to gain power over others by means of the political process will – or even can -- resist the criminal tendencies related to the libido dominandi (the desire of having power) once they have had a taste of it. After all, have they not extended the lockdowns month after month, despite their initial promise to limit their molestation to only a couple of weeks? The preventive effect of setting a good example against this evil is worth more than any pile of promises from the lips of a politician. One might even say it’s “priceless.”
  • Why not consider an ethical review of healthcare “professionals,” such as Dr. Strangelove Fauci, who have violated the admonishment primum non nocere (first do no harm) by exceeding their scope of competence? They have issued a series of contradictory mandates that place a smothering pillow (“It’s for your own good, dear, now be quiet!”) over the vast array of activities that constitute an entire civilization – a civilization which they and nobody else, for that matter, can fully comprehend in its immensity and complexity much less control with any pretense of wisdom. Didn’t we already learn this lesson from the Soviets, the Communist Chinese, the Cubans, and the North Koreans?

 
State by state, isn’t it time that lawyers make use of their state-bar-association-related legal monopolies and prove that Shakespeare’s suggestion about lawyers was mere hyperbole: “…first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” (Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2)?
 

Worse Than Ever: Government Schools After 35 Years (6000-word full version published by the Tom Woods Show)

Part 1: The Current Status of Government Monopoly Schools
This is the story of a former teacher who – after a 35-year absence – returned to the classroom to help a local high school overcome a temporary emergency. Why tell this tale? It’s not to reiterate facts about the bloated budgets and dismal performance of government schools. Better researchers than me have done that job, most recently Professor Bryan Caplan in his devastating book, The Case Against Education. Moreover, I won’t address the important topic of alternative-learning methods such as homeschooling, unschooling (self-directed learning), and internships.
 
Instead, I speak as someone with business experience. I was not an “education major” or teacher who hasn’t left the classroom since first setting foot there in Kindergarten. I took an advanced interdisciplinary academic degree in medieval studies nearly 40 years ago and subsequently enrolled in courses to obtain a secondary-school teaching certification in Latin, history, and social studies. After teaching in the Detroit Public Schools for a couple of years in the early 1980s, I worked as a freelance writer and senior corporate editor and manager for international business consulting, architectural, marketing, technology, and healthcare firms. Meanwhile, I continued to study economics, medieval thought, manuscripts, and early printing.
 
As a final introductory note, this is not an attack on the teachers, who are caught in the machinery of factory-style government-monopoly schools. Many of them are knowledgeable, sincere, and hard working. The unhappiness, anger, and resentment they have disclosed to me can only reveal them as co-victims alongside the children. Both are ground up in the misery-making gears of this self-perpetuating institution. I confess that I disliked school as a child, and after my recent experience teaching, I was left – more than ever – with a suspicion that government schools bear a closer resemblance to a trawler’s gillnet than anything else. Sure, about one third of enrolled children seem to suffer no ill effects and even enjoy it. Another third merely tolerate the experience. But for the remainder, it is a soulless grind. At different ages, children may shift from one of these three broad categories to another, but it would be a massive error to think that this institution is a solution to the question of how children learn.
 

The New Political Agenda
Late in 2017, I was semi-retired, and during a weekly meeting of my economics discussion group, I was asked to teach Latin at a remotely located Catholic school in suburban Detroit. I turned it down, but it got me thinking that I might enjoy teaching again. So I renewed my Michigan teaching certification in 2018. That was my first encounter with a system that was even more politically charged than in the past. My 1982 certification document, for example, was simple. It had a title, a list of courses that I was certified to teach, and some signature boxes. Period. But the September 2018 version contained nearly 300 additional words that amounted to a profession of faith in politically defined collectivism and diversity. It was disguised as a “Professional Educator’s Code of Ethics,” but there was little about ethics beyond the label. Instead, it committed the signatory to the following:
 

  • Service toward [a] common good
  • …[a] primary goal…of creating…a democratic society
  • …advocate the practice of equity…[and] for equal access to educational opportunities for each individual
  • Diversity…to ensure that instruction reflects the realities and diversity of the world
  • …acceptable social practices…

 
These seemingly benign concepts have been re-defined over the past few decades. They no longer mean voluntary cooperation to achieve a valued goal, even-handedness in dealing with children, recognition of the unique character of each child, and behaviors that are appropriate to respond to the competing demands made by large groups of children. They now mean political collectivism, radical egalitarianism, a politically charged recognition of skin color and gender identities, and conformity to cultural fads and wish lists promoted by teachers’ unions.
 
But if I held these reservations, why continue to the next step? My answer was simple: I couldn’t make matters worse. My personal belief is that unschooling and homeschooling work better for some children all of the time and for some children part of the time. This doesn’t mean I thought I could “change the system from the inside.” You can’t fix something as sclerotic as a government school. But I could expose students to ways of thinking that they are unlikely to encounter from teachers who have never strayed beyond the hothouse classroom environment.
 

We Need a Latin Teacher
I moved to the city of Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, about four years ago, and I have been a volunteer at a nearby literacy center, some local parishes, and in my property owners’ association. So I got to know quite a few people for a newcomer. And since my home is located on a corner, I have opportunities to meet many passersby. Early in October 2018, a neighbor approached me about an urgent need for a Latin teacher at Grosse Pointe South High School, where his children attended school. An instructor had just resigned, and it was difficult to find a replacement in the middle of a semester. The school is architecturally interesting, built about 100 years ago of stone and brick in the Georgian Revival style. It sits in a community with a relatively high median income and is viewed as a good school by conventional measures. I agreed to an interview the very next day, a Friday afternoon. Afterward, I was asked to teach three “test” classes for Latin I and Latin II students on Monday morning, October 15. Things were moving fast.
 
I reviewed what the children had been studying and prepared two lectures and some handouts corresponding to their lessons in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The vice principal, department head, and another Latin teacher sat in on my “test” classes. Two days later I received an offer, and by Friday I was teaching both classes at no charge since the hire date (with me on the payroll) was set for the following Monday. I stepped in early because I wanted to minimize the disruption for the students. For readers who are unfamiliar with the poet Ovid, his classic myths carry messages about humility, pride, wrath, and the sexual peccadillos of the gods. Because I had training in medieval history and literature, however, I hoped to bring a dimension that most classicists don’t.
 

Hoodwinked Taxpayers and My Advance Resignation
Within a few days, it was clear that many students did not understand even English grammar, much less the fundamentals of Latin. So I retraced some basics, and I attempted to minimize their anxiety by sharing my dislike for school and learning foreign languages when I was their age. I also related a list of my worst failures to demonstrate that even if they were struggling, it should not demoralize them. Moreover, since completion of a foreign language was a graduation requirement at the school, I outlined how they could pass my course with a “C” or “D” and not have to take it again. How? By simply learning the vocabulary for each lesson. That, along with credit for homework and class participation, would guarantee that they could pass the course with a moderate effort. It is true that there were some really excellent students enrolled in my classes, but there was no bell curve. The scores were heavily clumped into two groups: a large number who did poorly and a smaller number in the A and B range. This made me curious, so I quietly began to pose questions to other teachers and to some students. Their answers were surprising – a topic I’ll explore more fully in a while. But first I want to relate what happened during my third week as a teacher. The passage of a $111 million school bond on November 6, 2018 (55% in favor) changed everything.
 
It is important to understand that the student population of the Grosse Pointe Public School System has been dropping since 1975, when there were 11,145 students. There currently are 7,620 students enrolled, a figure expected to fall to 7,155 by 2022 (a 36% reduction since 1975). Citing water leaks at some locations, a few school board members stampeded voters into believing that the sky would fall if they did not pass the massive bond sale. Some board members disagreed, and a building contractor advised the district to close and sell its underutilized properties to pay for upgrades. Public school per-pupil spending is at least twice as high in the U.S. as it was 30 years ago, but the results are dismal – especially in Michigan. Residents who voted in favor of this bond sale and tax really believe that the money is not wasted! In fact, they must believe it! Why? Because if they realized they were paying astronomical taxes for nothing, they would have to admit that they had been duped. And nobody wants to feel that way. They would rather put a good face on it and pretend that the local money pit “made a difference.” I’ve even formulated a “law of bamboozlement”: The higher the perceived goodness of one’s school district, the more willing a taxpayer is to be duped. And the level of bamboozlement rises in direct proportion to the taxes mulcted. It’s a case of fiscal Stockholm syndrome: unable to escape the situation, the taxpayer becomes part of the victimization to regain a sense of autonomy, however false.
 
I was stunned by the passage of this bond measure, and as a resident taxpayer, I was alarmed by the behavior of my fellow teachers when the results were announced at an all-hands training event. During the victory announcement, a bit of humility would have been appropriate – not the raucous display in the crowded auditorium. If Bugsy Siegel’s gang had looted Fort Knox, the celebration would have been more subdued. It is understandable that teachers will favor school taxes, but voters in the district were sharply divided. Taxes are high in the district, and the local newspapers and school board had played a one-sided game to promote the measure. So after careful consideration, I submitted a delayed-action resignation four days later, on November 10.
 
To prevent disruption to the students’ curriculum, I promised to remain in the classroom until a replacement was found. Once word got out, however, my students seemed unaware of that concession, and many thought I had abandoned them. I never received a copy of the announcement – which was typical of this school. When a student reporter from the school paper subsequently asked me why I resigned, I told her that the recent passage of seven taxes induced me to re-open my business. I also said that I couldn’t prevent the school from taking my tax money, but I wouldn’t also let them have my talents. I also explained that taxation is a form of theft – the old story about two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Not surprisingly, the interview never made it into print. But during the interview, the reporter divulged something else. I was the third, not the second, Latin teacher to resign in a six-month period. This was news to me, and it corroborated what I had been hearing about low standards at the school.
 

Low Expectations, Helicopter Moms, and Time Preference
In addition to poor test scores, I noted other problems: the failure of many students to bring books to class, resentment about homework, and student expectations of high grades in spite of no proficiency or effort. Children told me that they had to get good grades and were accustomed to obtaining them. They expected great results no matter what. The mother of a second-year student even telephoned me about her son. When I pointed out that he rarely studied, did homework, or showed mastery, she was unfazed. Attempts to bargain for higher scores were endemic. And when I asked other teachers and students about this, I was told the following:

  • Latin class was a dumping ground for students who already had failed in another language.
  • Many teachers expect little and give higher grades.
  • Students were thrown into the Latin courses so that they could merely “pick up a few phrases and pass the language requirement.”
  • Students are subjected to lots of parental pressure to get good grades (regardless of how they are obtained).
  • A department head had been demoted because he taught his classes to prepare students for college-level work and refused to lower his standards.
  • Senior-level teachers had been quitting for some time – disgusted by the increasingly low standards accepted at the school. Mid-career and young teachers accepted the prevailing trend because they had no options.
  • The word “entitlement” arose constantly in discussions about the situation.

 
One of the more bizarre initiatives at this school was a real bellwether. The principal was establishing a process to prevent students from having to take more than one test on the same day! Why? To placate complaining parents. If these children expected to be successful at a university, they would soon discover how far their high school had led them down the garden path. The need for remedial classes at institutions of higher learning is a clear indicator that grade schools are not doing the job. The point is that – with a few outspoken parents leading the charge – the school was abandoning the concept of merit in favor of grade inflation. How do such parents come to dominate school policies? It’s a bit like Gresham’s law, but with a difference: Instead of “bad money” driving out “good money,” inflationary grading practices drive out rigorous ones.

  • The parents of genuinely high-performing students are typical “satisfied customers.” Their children study, and they bring home good grades. So these parents have every reason to believe they are getting their money’s worth from high school taxes. But they don’t realize that there is no correlation between per-pupil spending and student performance.
  • Parents of low-performing students also want good “results” for their children. They listen to a child’s tale of woe and complain about teachers who dispense poor grades “unfairly.” The pressure is on, and it only pushes in one direction – against high standards and in favor of grade inflation. Since the parents of nonperforming students are more likely to complain, administrators receive one-sided feedback and respond accordingly – by pressuring teachers to lower standards.

 
In effect, schools imitate the Dodo in Lewis Carroll’s story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “…everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
 
A principle of human action called “high time preference” also explains this phenomenon. A concept of the Austrian School of economics, high time preference refers to the human tendency to place a higher value on receiving something sooner rather than later – in other words, “wanting it now.” It is the opposite of “delayed gratification” (low time preference), which includes the idea of making sacrifices in the present to obtain a benefit in the future. As I look back on what I witnessed at Grosse Pointe South High School, I realize that the concept of high time preference is a valuable lens by which to understand the drift toward low standards and grade inflation there.
 
Please understand, however, that there were many exceptions to this trend, and I enjoyed cordial relationships with the staff, students, and parents. I liked and respected most of these people and still do. Many teachers were very helpful to me, and many confided their deep concerns – partly because they knew I was not as enmeshed in the permanent structure of the institution. But these dedicated people are caught in a stifling system that responds to distorted signals and dysfunctional pressures. There is no real “market.” There are no genuine customers paying with their own money. Everyone is forced to pay regardless of whether they use the system or not. For parents who want good results with little effort, I’d wager that they pay more attention to their choice of wide-screen TVs than their children’s education. And I heard from more than one teacher that talk of “high standards” was mere window dressing – just talk.
 
Once word got out that I was resigning, teachers quietly approached me to say that they “understood why” I was quitting. They related stories about other senior-level teachers who were disgusted and were simply hanging on because they had no place else to go. And it wasn’t just teachers employed at the school who confided in me. Because I converse with so many people in my neighborhood, they tell me about friends and acquaintances who had previously taught. I even heard about one teacher who had resigned from a Roman Catholic school to accept a position at Grosse Pointe North High School; he resigned after only a few weeks because it was “chaos.” The point is that attempts to save feelings and subvert meritocracy in favor of egalitarianism always lead to the same thing: a “downward” levelling instead of an “upward” lifting. As a result, the performance levels in Grosse Pointe South are now below what I encountered in some public schools in Detroit back in the early 1980s. Sadly, overprotective parents inculcate a habit of running away from challenges. They also prevent children from experiencing the rewarding feeling of achievement. As a result, children remain infantile and dependent – always seeking bailouts from the kind of person who likes to dispense unearned largesse.
 
 

Part 2: The Political Byproduct of Government-Controlled Schools

Big Brother and Political Fads
The ascendancy of political fads and surveillance in public schools is undeniable. When I was a child, you were on your own after the bell rang and were released from school. Afternoons, evenings, weekends, and vacations were free from the watchful eye of the school bureaucracy. And student performance was better than it is now. Today, government schools seem to take their cues directly from the CIA and TSA. Big Brother is always watching. Having failed to instill even the most basic facts about the world, schools now monitor children at home, at play, and on social media. Their excuse? “If it has an impact on what happens in school, it’s school business.” Today’s children will never learn the sense of outrage that healthy individuals feel in the presence of Peeping Toms. Instead, they’re learning to love Big Brother. Everything is political:

  • Resistance to unapproved facts. On the day before the Thanksgiving break, I treated my students to a slide-show about the invention of moveable-type printing in Europe. For more than a decade, I have delivered this presentation to book clubs and at library fundraisers. The illustrated presentation includes a short segment about the growth of literacy that followed Gutenberg’s invention in 1454/1455. One student was rather upset when I mentioned that literacy already had increased to high levels in the West before public schools became mandatory. Like most people, he had been told another story, making him resistant to new information.
  • Progressive political bias. I did not vote for President Trump, but anti-Trump derangement syndrome was widespread among the teachers. I never initiated political conversations with my peers, but this didn’t stop them – both in and out of the classroom. Then, on one of my last days teaching, I caved in to the relentless requests of my students to divulge my politics. They had a hard time grasping the concept of voluntary behavior and libertarianism. It was simply too new to them after a highly restricted diet of conventional opinions. Likewise, when a school counselor asked me about my politics at a private holiday party, he showed that his understanding of libertarianism was of the comic-book variety. The unsolicited avalanche of hostility that poured out of him was a good indication of the prevailing mindset.
  • Fascination with socialism and Antifa. On the day I revealed my political philosophy, I noted that a few students had imbibed some very selective beliefs about socialism and fascism. They were unaware that Mussolini had viewed himself as a socialist, which was the springboard of his fascist movement. One student seemed particularly fascinated by Antifa. To provide a context, I explained the central component of fascism buried within Antifa’s violent practices by exploring the etymology of the word fascism and its roots in the Latin language (the Roman fasces was a bundle of sticks with an axe buried in the center, a symbol of the violent threat behind obedience to the Roman state). I also mentioned that the Nazis and Hitler himself were examples of socialism – that “socialist” was part the official name of the Nazi party itself. This was “news” to the student, who entered a state of denial, but I felt I had made a good start in debunking a false one-sided narrative.
  • Ahistorical views of slavery. During our class discussions of Latin vocabulary, it became clear that most of my students had never integrated an understanding of the historically widespread practice of slavery. Their view was dominated by its practice in America. They were surprised – even resistant – to knowledge about the etymological basis of the word slave in the word Slav. Moreover, they had somehow absorbed an understanding that Western Europeans were the most enthusiastic practitioners of slavery instead of the first to abandon that practice. I do not champion collective guilt or pride. As individuals, we are responsible for our own behavior, and we inherit neither the virtues nor vices of those who have lived before us. But the instinct toward collective pride and guilt is so strong that it shouldn’t be a surprise that my students showed signs of its influence.
  • Overdependence on technology. School blackboards have been replaced in every classroom with blurry projection devices, which slow down the learning process to a crawl. Language classes, in particular, include the writing of sentences in which a verb or noun changes form. Homework assignments displaying these changes have to be reviewed as a group, and electronic displays permit only one student at a time to write out the material for class discussion. A blackboard is much more efficient because several students can simultaneously write out their homework answers on the boards while the teacher takes attendance. Then, after asking children to exchange their homework assignments, a teacher can quickly correct the examples written out on the blackboard in front of the class so that students can understand how the homework should have been completed and correct the exchanged homework at the same time. This is only possible, however, if students can write on a blackboard. This is no longer the case. Blackboards are covered up or removed. Moreover, although most students can type, few can write legibly – another failure of the system.
  • Anti-2nd Amendment walkout. In March, 2018, Grosse Pointe students walked out of classes to “protest” the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This took place before it was revealed that the FBI failed to act on tips about the shooter, that school “security” failed to act, that Broward County Public School’s disciplinary practices played a key role leading to the shootings, and that the school district tried to cover up its deeds by suing the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper for publishing documents that revealed these facts. Fortunately the Sun-Sentinel prevailed in the lawsuit. The long and short of it is that this school-approved Children’s Crusade was based on ignorance and superstitions about guns.
  • Quest for gender dysphoria. The new frontier in virtue signaling is the recognition of gender dysphoria. Everyone wants to be au courant in the diversity wars. What could possibly go wrong? Young people typically experiment with different “identities,” trying them on for size. They rapidly adopt and discard career possibilities, hobbies, and interests. But the gender dysphoria fad requires rigid adherence to a stereotyped view that certain behaviors are only for boys and some for girls. By encouraging children to entertain a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, school counselors are taking unnecessary risks. Some children have a powerful need for attention and seek it out by jumping on the latest bandwagon. Others have a strong desire to engage in behaviors that will please “important” adults and lead to emotional rewards from these adults. And the media buzz over gender identity primes the pump for adults who are eager to “prove” they are sensitive to the latest thing. But the consequences can be severe if a “diagnosis” leads to medical treatment with permanent consequences. It also can lead to absurd requests. Shortly after being hired, I was contacted by a counselor who asked me to address one student with “plural” pronouns to acknowledge her/his chosen gender identity – all without any evidence that a mental health professional was involved. This would not have been an issue for me if the student were an adult. I try to treat people respectfully regardless of personal differences. But why impose a straight-jacket of gender roles on a student just so he/she can be stereotyped according to the latest political fad? And I had other objections. First, this student was too young to be making this choice. Second, he/she may have been responding to the trendiness of this issue; he/she had demonstrated more than once an interest in fringe politics and behaviors – typical teenage stuff. I believed he/she was attempting to manipulate adults into “playing along” – another teenage pastime. Third, he/she was a bright individual who did not do her homework or study. He/she didn’t even understand what a pronoun was in the first place! Latin is a highly inflected language in which the word endings of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives change depending upon the gender and number of the noun or person involved. This request would only muddy the learning process. Finally, it was completely unnecessary since I always referred to my students by name. No pronouns were needed. So the request was unnecessary. My explanation did not please the counselor or student, but I nonetheless made sure that he/she was treated respectfully in my class.

 

Resentfulness and Groupthink
The most dangerous byproduct of government schools is not ignorance. We are all born with it, and it is easily cured. No. The most fundamental danger is the petty-minded, ethically unmoored, and emotionally infantile children they produce. And like all creatures condemned to an infantilized existence, they resent it. Even worse, since they have abandoned defensible concepts such as individual rights and accountability in favor of fictitious group rights, group punishments, and social justice, they cannot even appreciate the comparative safety and abundance that they currently enjoy. To illustrate, I will relate two incidents.
 
Case #1: The parsing devotion to petty rules was evident at a “mother’s luncheon” that took place on December 7, 2018. This annual event showcases members of the Mother’s Club, who prepare lunch for the teachers. It is hosted in beautiful Cleminson Hall, originally the school’s library, which had been decorated for the holiday season. Like other teachers who attended, I enjoyed the relaxation and was about to start on dessert. Suddenly our attention was drawn by the behavior of the school principal. In disbelief, we watched as he waded through the tables of dining teachers, like a buzz-kill angel of death, gleefully plucking tiny half-shots of amaretto – one by one – from the top of each dessert. The reason? A minuscule quantity of alcohol. Never mind that it would sooner trigger diabetes than drunkenness – even if one person were to drink them all. But Grosse Pointe South is an “alcohol-free zone.” After purging the room of deadly amaretto, his mission accomplished, our dear leader folded his leathery wings and sat down only two chairs down from me.
 
I debated within myself. Surely someone must say something! I looked around me. My fellow teachers sat with eyes downcast, surveying their ravaged plates. They were embarrassed and afraid to speak. But I had nothing to lose. So I turned in my chair and said: “Moussa, if you absolutely had to do this, I would have liked you so much more if you had taken all of the amaretto vials behind a partition and drunk them down yourself instead of throwing them in the trash in front of the ladies who made the dessert.” This occurred on a Friday afternoon. About a half-hour later, as I was about to leave the school building, I saw the principal in the main hallway. We were walking toward each other. But when he spotted me, he averted his eyes and scuttled off to the side to avoid me.
 
On Monday, the vice principal called me into his office. He said that my resignation would be accepted at the end of the semester, in about a month. Assuming they had found a replacement for me, I was pleased and said so. But he told me that there was no replacement. The classes would be canceled. Had my criticism only days before led to this? The students, who would soon complete five months of work toward the language requirement, would receive only a general credit unless they could be placed in one of the surviving Latin classes for the final semester. Were they paying the price for my comment to the principal?
 
Case #2: The second incident demonstrated a danger posed by the political drift. I previously related that one of my students was favorably inclined toward Antifa. For those who are unfamiliar with Antifa, they physically attack people whose politics differ from their own, frequently calling their opponents Nazis and fascists. But unapproved thoughts and hurtful words are not illegal in the United States, despite attempts to hollow-out the 1st Amendment. As psychologist Jordan Peterson has pointed out, if you are not free to speak, you cannot learn. It is only by hearing error and hearing it corrected that we learn. I would go further. The snuffing out of free speech brings the silence of the tomb. And the vapid concept of “hate speech” has so consumed the wielders of rule books, that hurt feelings have replaced bodily injury in the hierarchy of wrongdoing in the minds of many people.
 
The Antifa fan was a perfect example of this upside-down hierarchy of values. On one hand, she was outraged by the idea of hurt feelings as a result of free speech. On the other, she herself was a victim of physical violence in one of the school’s stairwells, and she did not report it. Instead, she shrugged it off. I discovered this in a roundabout way. There had been an incident on the street outside the school in which a male student supposedly brandished a firearm after bothering a female student. When I mentioned the incident to my pro-Antifa student, she said that she knew the boy who had brandished the weapon. She said he had once pushed her down the stairs. Upset, I asked if she had reported the incident. She said “no” and shrugged her shoulders – indicating that she had no strong feelings about it. I told her that if she had reported this incident when it occurred, it may have prevented the brandishing incident. She shrugged again, and the conversation ended. My translation? A physical attack is unimportant according to the new rules, but hurt feelings are crimes that deserve attacks by thugs. Two generations ago, a common phrase about the difference between words and violence was “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” There is wisdom in it:

  • The source of hurt feelings lies within the control of each person. Any cognitive therapist will tell you that we have the freedom to choose how we react – emotionally or otherwise – to errors, falsehoods, and antagonistic speech. Our choice is to exercise control over our interior dialog or act as children do by blaming others for our thoughts, feelings, and actions. In other words, when we blame others for our thoughts, feelings, and actions, we are admitting that we are their slaves – allowing others to control us like sock puppets. It’s a key differentiator between infants and adults. Are schools helping to shape adults, or not?
  • The initiation of violence – properly called aggression – can inflict irreparable physical damage. This is much more serious than hurt feelings or the ignorance caused by internalizing erroneous opinions. These can be remedied, but broken bones and torn flesh leave permanent scars, and some wounds are fatal or debilitating.

 
The world of political correctness is now dominated by thought crimes, hate speech, hurt feelings, and intersectionality. Moreover, the rules of political correctness – in the minds of many young people – grant tacit permission to the face-punching, bat-swinging, broken-glass-wielding fists of the balaclava-masked Antifa mobs. With police standing by, they execute their program with the same anonymity and fervor as the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan members of whom they are the mirror image. They have jettisoned their identities as individuals responsible for their actions. Choosing the anonymity of the group, they have been subsumed into a faceless mob that acts not with the incisive thought of a single human soul, but with a shrieking thought-substitute. They have replaced syllogisms with the latest bumper-sticker slogan repeated dutifully in public schools.
 

Group Identities
Strictly speaking, groups have no physical existence. They are mental constructs that refer to more than one individual for convenience. These concepts bear some relationship to reality, but a “group” does not have the same independent existential presence as an individual person. A person bleeds; concepts don’t. A group is merely a reference to the pre-existing members of which it consists. By acquiescing to identity politics and the primacy of groups, people avoid accountability for their own lives. They hide behind labels, and they often learn this in government schools. In such a condition, they accept group rewards and punishments. This collectivist groupthink is the source of racism, white supremacy, the quest for affirmative action programs, and every other group-centered outlook that denigrates the individual – whether it emphasizes ethnic background, income disparities, age and sex differences, or gender identity. And government schools increasingly are exchanging the concept of individual merit for “equitable outcomes” based on superficial characteristics such as skin color, sex, and gender identify.
 
Is it any wonder that today’s high school children, when they attend universities, cannot tolerate free speech? Instead, they demand trigger warnings and safe spaces to recuperate from the “trauma” of exposure ideas with which they disagree? Is it surprising that they attack guest speakers, cancel events, and act like cretins at the University of Michigan? The behavior of mobs at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, Evergreen State, Middlebury College, and at the University of Michigan is telling us a story about what government schools are doing to children. They graduate as resentful slaves to their feelings – fit only to compete in the Victim Olympics, where their status as self-identified victims becomes the focus of their lives instead of their achievements.
 

The Rearview Mirror
Looking back on my recent experience, I’ve concluded that too many schools stand in the way of meeting the individual needs of each student, and they de-nature the art of teaching. They stigmatize the “personal stamp” a teacher can bring to the learning process. This fractures the interpersonal bond between teacher and student, and it introduces a faceless, soulless substitute. For example, each day, I had a habit of introducing legal and philosophical concepts embodied in Latin phrases such as malum in se (evil in itself), malum prohibitum (evil by prohibition), ex nihilo (out of nothing), essentia (essence), and ens (being), etc. These terms communicate a world view that is at odds with current trends. Nonetheless, they provide a rich field of exploration because they are an entryway for understanding what it means to be a human being and have meaning in one’s life – something that is sadly lacking for many people. But explorations of this kind border on politics and are contrary to the vapid and relativistic environment now dominating public schools.
 
Likewise, individual eccentricities in teaching style and student conduct simply don’t fit into the straightjacket that government factory schools enforce. It is easy to run afoul of an accusation of being “unprofessional” simply because your personal interests show through in nonstandard ways. A vegan student, for example, recoiled in horror when I brought in a 13th-century manuscript written on the hide of a newborn calf. There were similar frowns when – in addition to my one-hour availability in school each day – I mentioned that I often could be found at a convenient neighborhood brew-house. This kind of fastidious pearl-clutching narrows the range of “acceptable” interaction to something that pleases crossing-guard “scolds” whose chief joy in life is to reprimand anyone caught stepping outside the lines of the crosswalk. And it smothers the learning process with a pillow made of small-minded rules. As a result, instead of being a life-affirming experience, government schools become joyless for too many students and teachers. Yes, teachers are just as much victims of this process as the children. At one private event, I listened to teachers venting their frustrations and fantasizing about what they would do and say on the day they retired. These were otherwise talented, engaged, and humorous teachers. But they felt cornered and muzzled. Can you really blame them for feeling frustrated and resentful?
 
It is true that the learning process can impose psychological and cognitive burdens on students. It sometimes requires an effort to master a subject. I don’t expect the learning process to be effortless or not to require some “sacrifice” for a future goal. It is much like other challenges imposed on humans by gravity or the need to transform energy and matter from one form to another in order to sustain life. We may not like it, but we don’t live in a world where apple pies dangle from trees. Life-sustaining things require effort. And that truth is something that a segment of the “unschooling” community does not always acknowledge. But political demands and straightjackets really do suck the joy out of personal interaction between students and teachers – interactions that can make the sacrifices of learning more worthwhile. And that’s just one of the tragedies imposed by the government’s monopoly schools.
 

Looking Forward
Fortunately increasing numbers of parents are waking up and rescuing their children. They are embracing alternatives that include online courses, unschooling, and homeschooling. The Ron Paul Curriculum and Tom Woods Liberty Classroom are just a couple of examples. In effect, they are discovering what countless millions worldwide have learned: collectivist systems fail. From food production to manufacturing to technological innovation, markets always outperform top-down government systems of control. Collectivist systems condemn people to lousy mail service, starvation, shortages, pothole-filled roads, economic stagnation, obedience, and income extraction through taxation. The opposite happens with markets. There, people control their own money and purchase exactly what they want in the quantity they desire. Unfortunately, most parents, students, and teachers continue to cling to a system inculcated at an early age by special-interest propagandists. And they are getting exactly what they pay for.
 
-----
Lawrence M. Ludlow provides international location analyses, technical writing, and marketing services to corporate clients. He holds an M.A. in medieval studies from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and has lectured on manuscripts, early printing, and art history at the Newberry Library in Chicago and at the San Diego Public Library. 
 
Here's the link to the Tom Woods Show article. Tom was gracious enough to interview me about this on his show and print the full version. https://tomwoods.com/worse-than-ever-government-schools-after-35-years/
 
Here's the link to the Tom Woods Show interview: https://tomwoods.com/ep-1477-teacher-pulls-back-curtain-on-government-schools/
 

Human Resources and Cancel Culture

Current human resource (HR) policies deliberately misuse terms such as diversity and equity to achieve political ends.  That isn’t news. But the process by which those terms were twisted into their current shapes is worth a look.  Likewise, it is important to see how their current usage is grounded in economic ignorance and unsound ethics.  Sadly, the resultant HR policies -- including microaggression training and gender-and-race training -- feed a growth industry of diversity hucksters.  These quick-buck artists subvert productive corporate meritocracies and replace them with systems that enshrine mediocrity, manufacture complaints, and generate resentment – not to mention whining and pearl clutching.  Even worse, the dismal results of these programs only seem to validate those who started them!  The dysfunctional corporate cultures they create give politically motivated HR staff an opportunity to “referee” disputes among their newly infantilized employees.  Meanwhile, adults who just want to do their jobs well, get paid, and go home are marginalized or driven off – as in the case of Google engineer James Damore; scores of editors, journalists, and columnists; and university professors in the U.S. and Canada.

From Cross-Cultural Training to “Woke” HR Policies
It wasn’t always this way. Cross-cultural business training is a valuable initiative that goes back at least 50 years.  In the 1990s, for example, innovative firms offered programs based on the work of Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede.  Hofstede’s “cultural dimensions theory” identified crucial differences in world cultures.  His theory was adapted and incorporated into programs that assist employees as they conduct business around the world.  In particular, these programs train people to respond appropriately to the following culture-based sensitivities, or “dimensions”:

  • Hierarchy -- the ways (and degree to which) people rank themselves and interact at work and socially.
  • Change tolerance – the importance of maintaining traditions, personal loyalties, and rules vs a willingness to innovate, take risks, and control your destiny.
  • Group dependence – the relative importance of the individual vs the group – including the importance of independent action and decision-making vs acting as part of a team based on a shared consensus.
  • Diversity receptivity – how roles, power, authority, and expectations are associated with gender, race, religion, and country of origin.
  • Status attainment – the importance of goals and personal achievement for a sense of well-being vs one’s family position, social connections, sense of job satisfaction, and personal traits.
  • Relationships – the importance of long-term relationships and a history of trust before engaging in business, pricing, and schedules.
  • Communication – the importance of having deep, contextual, background information for each situation and a more complete sets of nonverbal cues in addition to language.
  • Time – the degree to which time is seen as something that you control with plans and schedules as well as the willingness to engage in many activities simultaneously vs. only one.
  • Space – the use of space to define oneself when speaking to others as well as privacy in the workplace and for living spaces.

These cultural dimensions express a rich legacy of human interrelationships, and they inform the way people respond to business offers and conduct.  Employees who receive competent cultural training are more able to engage businesspeople in different cultures.  As a result, there are no enemies,  no oppressors,  no victims.  Sadly, this is not the case with the “cancel culture” generated by enforced equality and faux diversity.

New Frontiers in Failure: HR Departments in Action
Bored with their “pedestrian” mission of helping employees do their jobs, HR departments have changed their focus.  They want what economist Thomas Sowell calls “cosmic justice,” going far beyond their area of competence – and anyone else’s.  It’s a leftist agenda of postmodernism, identity politics, and intersectionality – complete with its mythology of oppressors and victims.  And they’ve manufactured lots of victims and oppressors as finger-pointing reaches epic levels.  Professors Michael Rectenwald and Jordan Peterson have outlined the history of this movement in academia.  Consequently, I can focus on its most common manifestation in HR departments: the obsession with (1) equality and (2) superficial “diversity” characteristics such as skin color, gender identity, sexual preference, and one’s biological sex.

The Procrustean Ideal of Equality
Legend tells us that Procrustes was a robber with an iron bed.  He forced his victims to lie on it: If the victim was shorter than the bed, Procrustes stretched him on a rack until he fit.  If the victim was longer than the bed, he cut off the legs until perfection was achieved.  Either way, the victim died.  That’s the faith-based religion of today’s egalitarians.  Moreover, their understanding of economics is just as crude and its results just as cruel as Procrustes’.   Economist David Henderson has thoroughly debunked today’s equality fetish – devastating the notions that people are becoming poorer, are trapped at low income levels, or should be taxed more heavily if they’re wealthy.  He also points out that people too quickly assume that wealth is obtained in a nefarious manner.  Some people indeed do achieve wealth through political favors and other forms of dishonesty, but most earn their wealth by making our lives better and by increasing worker productivity by means of wise investments.
Likewise, notions of unfairness regarding sex and skin color are based in ignorance.  Thomas Sowell long ago debunked the notion that women unfairly earn only 75% of what men earn.  He wrote, “As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description.”  How?  Men accept different types of jobs (in risk and unpleasantness) than women, work for their employers much longer (seniority), and work more hours each year.  Once you factor in these choices, the so-called wage gap disappears.  Likewise, Sowell has documented the misguided nature of claims that minorities suffer earning disparities as a result of racism.  He showed that individual choices are the primary cause of measurable disparities – often influenced by, but not determined by, cultural attitudes.

A Focus on the Superficial
By focusing on characteristics that aren’t essential to the job – such as skin color, gender, sexual preferences, and a growing list of “identities” – HR departments expend scarce resources on policies that don’t contribute to the bottom line.  Seeking to achieve sexual parity in hiring, for example, they ignore the findings of psychologists, who have identified a set of Big Five personality traits.  What do they show?  Despite exceptions and significant overlap between the sexes, sex-specific personality traits result in men and women having different interests.  These differences are expressed in all cultures, including those that attempt to prevent gender-specific behavioral reinforcement during childhood (generating the gender equality paradox).  Ironically, the welfare state itself tends to reinforce the gender equality paradox.  And you can’t penalize sex-based differences without doing significant harm.

What Next?
What will be the outcome at organizations that substitute sex- and race-based quotas for genuine ability and merit?  How will these programs affect medical safety in an operating room or the design of a bridge?  You can’t have performance if you hire employees based on characteristics that reduce the pool of qualified applicants.  Pick one or the other, corporate America!  You can’t have both.  To paraphrase H.L. Mencken’s quip about democracy, “American organizations deserve to get exactly what they ask for – good and hard.”
 
Lawrence M. Ludlow provides international location analyses, marketing, and business writing services to corporate clients.  He holds an M.A. in medieval studies from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and has lectured on manuscripts, early printing, and art history at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the San Diego Public Library.
 
Here's the original link at American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/human_resources_and_cancel_culture.html

Human Resources and Cancel Culture

Current human resource (HR) policies deliberately misuse terms such as diversity and equity to achieve political ends.  That isn’t news. But the process by which those terms were twisted into their current shapes is worth a look.  Likewise, it is important to see how their current usage is grounded in economic ignorance and unsound ethics.  Sadly, the resultant HR policies -- including microaggression training and gender-and-race training -- feed a growth industry of diversity hucksters.  These quick-buck artists subvert productive corporate meritocracies and replace them with systems that enshrine mediocrity, manufacture complaints, and generate resentment – not to mention whining and pearl clutching.  Even worse, the dismal results of these programs only seem to validate those who started them!  The dysfunctional corporate cultures they create give politically motivated HR staff an opportunity to “referee” disputes among their newly infantilized employees.  Meanwhile, adults who just want to do their jobs well, get paid, and go home are marginalized or driven off – as in the case of Google engineer James Damore; scores of editors, journalists, and columnists; and university professors in the U.S. and Canada.
From Cross-Cultural Training to “Woke” HR Policies
It wasn’t always this way. Cross-cultural business training is a valuable initiative that goes back at least 50 years.  In the 1990s, for example, innovative firms offered programs based on the work of Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede.  Hofstede’s “cultural dimensions theory” identified crucial differences in world cultures.  His theory was adapted and incorporated into programs that assist employees as they conduct business around the world.  In particular, these programs train people to respond appropriately to the following culture-based sensitivities, or “dimensions”:

  • Hierarchy -- the ways (and degree to which) people rank themselves and interact at work and socially.
  • Change tolerance – the importance of maintaining traditions, personal loyalties, and rules vs a willingness to innovate, take risks, and control your destiny.
  • Group dependence – the relative importance of the individual vs the group – including the importance of independent action and decision-making vs acting as part of a team based on a shared consensus.
  • Diversity receptivity – how roles, power, authority, and expectations are associated with gender, race, religion, and country of origin.
  • Status attainment – the importance of goals and personal achievement for a sense of well-being vs one’s family position, social connections, sense of job satisfaction, and personal traits.
  • Relationships – the importance of long-term relationships and a history of trust before engaging in business, pricing, and schedules.
  • Communication – the importance of having deep, contextual, background information for each situation and a more complete sets of nonverbal cues in addition to language.
  • Time – the degree to which time is seen as something that you control with plans and schedules as well as the willingness to engage in many activities simultaneously vs. only one.
  • Space – the use of space to define oneself when speaking to others as well as privacy in the workplace and for living spaces.

These cultural dimensions express a rich legacy of human interrelationships, and they inform the way people respond to business offers and conduct.  Employees who receive competent cultural training are more able to engage businesspeople in different cultures.  As a result, there are no enemies,  no oppressors,  no victims.  Sadly, this is not the case with the “cancel culture” generated by enforced equality and faux diversity.

 
New Frontiers in Failure: HR Departments in Action
Bored with their “pedestrian” mission of helping employees do their jobs, HR departments have changed their focus.  They want what economist Thomas Sowell calls “cosmic justice,” going far beyond their area of competence – and anyone else’s.  It’s a leftist agenda of postmodernism, identity politics, and intersectionality – complete with its mythology of oppressors and victims.  And they’ve manufactured lots of victims and oppressors as finger-pointing reaches epic levels.  Professors Michael Rectenwald and Jordan Peterson have outlined the history of this movement in academia.  Consequently, I can focus on its most common manifestation in HR departments: the obsession with (1) equality and (2) superficial “diversity” characteristics such as skin color, gender identity, sexual preference, and one’s biological sex.
The Procrustean Ideal of Equality
Legend tells us that Procrustes was a robber with an iron bed.  He forced his victims to lie on it: If the victim was shorter than the bed, Procrustes stretched him on a rack until he fit.  If the victim was longer than the bed, he cut off the legs until perfection was achieved.  Either way, the victim died.  That’s the faith-based religion of today’s egalitarians.  Moreover, their understanding of economics is just as crude and its results just as cruel as Procrustes’.   Economist David Henderson has thoroughly debunked today’s equality fetish – devastating the notions that people are becoming poorer, are trapped at low income levels, or should be taxed more heavily if they’re wealthy.  He also points out that people too quickly assume that wealth is obtained in a nefarious manner.  Some people indeed do achieve wealth through political favors and other forms of dishonesty, but most earn their wealth by making our lives better and by increasing worker productivity by means of wise investments.
Likewise, notions of unfairness regarding sex and skin color are based in ignorance.  Thomas Sowell long ago debunked the notion that women unfairly earn only 75% of what men earn.  He wrote, “As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description.”  How?  Men accept different types of jobs (in risk and unpleasantness) than women, work for their employers much longer (seniority), and work more hours each year.  Once you factor in these choices, the so-called wage gap disappears.  Likewise, Sowell has documented the misguided nature of claims that minorities suffer earning disparities as a result of racism.  He showed that individual choices are the primary cause of measurable disparities – often influenced by, but not determined by, cultural attitudes.
A Focus on the Superficial
By focusing on characteristics that aren’t essential to the job – such as skin color, gender, sexual preferences, and a growing list of “identities” – HR departments expend scarce resources on policies that don’t contribute to the bottom line.  Seeking to achieve sexual parity in hiring, for example, they ignore the findings of psychologists, who have identified a set of Big Five personality traits.  What do they show?  Despite exceptions and significant overlap between the sexes, sex-specific personality traits result in men and women having different interests.  These differences are expressed in all cultures, including those that attempt to prevent gender-specific behavioral reinforcement during childhood (generating the gender equality paradox).  Ironically, the welfare state itself tends to reinforce the gender equality paradox.  And you can’t penalize sex-based differences without doing significant harm.
What Next?
What will be the outcome at organizations that substitute sex- and race-based quotas for genuine ability and merit?  How will these programs affect medical safety in an operating room or the design of a bridge?  You can’t have performance if you hire employees based on characteristics that reduce the pool of qualified applicants.  Pick one or the other, corporate America!  You can’t have both.  To paraphrase H.L. Mencken’s quip about democracy, “American organizations deserve to get exactly what they ask for – good and hard.”
 
Lawrence M. Ludlow provides international location analyses, marketing, and business writing services to corporate clients.  He holds an M.A. in medieval studies from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and has lectured on manuscripts, early printing, and art history at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the San Diego Public Library.
 
Here's the original link at American Thinker: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/human_resources_and_cancel_culture.html

Worse Than Ever: Government Schools After 35 Years

As a semi-retired business writer who taught in Detroit 35 years ago, I returned to the classroom because a local high school was unable to replace a Latin teacher who had resigned.  I hold an advanced degree in medieval studies and renewed my certification to teach Latin, history, and social studies.  Once in class, I witnessed firsthand the politicized atmosphere of today's factory-style government-monopoly schools.
 
My first exposure to school politics came when I renewed my certification.  The 1982 certificate listed only the courses I could teach.  In contrast, the 2018 version had a 300-word "Code of Ethics" that amounted to a profession of faith in collectivism, egalitarianism, state schools, and diversity (typically limited to superficial things like skin color and sex, not ideas).  Nonetheless, I proceeded, thinking I couldn't possibly make matters worse.  That much was correct.
 
 
Grosse Pointe South High School is architecturally interesting, sits in a higher-income community, and is considered a good school by locals. 

After an interview and teaching a few "test" classes to first- and second-year students, I was hired.  Within a few days, however, it was clear that many students did not understand English grammar, much less Latin fundamentals.  In response, I taught remedial grammar and outlined how students could pass my course with a "C" or "D."  There were some excellent students, but test scores were not distributed in a bell-shaped curve.  It was an "inverted" bell, or bimodal distribution — with scores clumped at the two extremes. 
 

  • Poor preparation was only the tip of the iceberg.  Students did not bring books to class, relentlessly complained about homework, and expected high grades regardless of proficiency.  When I asked questions, I uncovered some alarming facts:
  •  
  • Latin was a dumping ground for students who already had failed another language; "picking up a few phrases" was the goal.
  • Many teachers expected little but awarded high grades.
  • Students were subjected to parental pressure to obtain good grades regardless of performance.
  • A department head had been demoted for teaching at a pre-college level and refusing to lower his standards.
  • Senior teachers were dropping out in disgust; younger teachers had no choice but to accept the situation.
  • Under parental pressure, the principal was establishing a process to prevent students from having to take more than one test on the same day.  College prep?

 
In short, the school embraced grade inflation, propelled by the following dynamic:

  • Parents of high-performing students are "satisfied customers."  Their kids study and bring home good grades, so they think they are getting their money's worth from high taxes.  But they don't know that there is no correlation between per pupil spending and student performance.  And they never complain.
  • Parents of low-performing students also want good "results."  They hear their children's tales of woe and complain constantly.
  • Subjected to this one-sided feedback, administrators tacitly urge teachers to lower standards, despite proclaiming the opposite in public.  Like the Dodo in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "everybody has won, and all must have prizes."

Austrian economists have explained this behavior.  Ludwig von Mises, for example, noted the human tendency to place a high value on receiving something sooner rather than later.  He called it time-preference theory.  The desire for immediate gratification with little effort explains the phenomenon of grade inflation.  At Grosse Pointe South High School, this practice goes undetected because it hides behind a much broader trend toward low achievement — most recently documented by Bryan Caplan in his devastating book, The Case against Education.  This trend is even more pronounced in Michigan, enabling Grosse Pointe students to slip under the radar.
The illusion of competence also explains why — despite falling student enrollment, which should reduce costs — Grosse Pointe and similar school districts succeed in raising school taxes.  Instead of being outraged at paying dearly for abysmal academic results, those who favor school taxes double down on their support!  It's a combination of psychological denial and fiscal Stockholm syndrome.  In denial, "the faithful" desperately cling to the notion that their elite high-tax district is exceptional despite the data.  They cannot admit they have been duped.  And since they cannot escape the fiscal dragnet of this tax-fed monopoly, in a classic display of Stockholm syndrome, they adopt the stance of their captors and cheer all the louder!  But to an outsider, they are playing the part of the fawning mob in Hans Christian Anderson's fable, The Emperor's New Clothes: they pretend the emperor is wearing splendid garments despite his nakedness.
Today's students are never free of the school district's watchful eye, which seems to take its cues from the CIA and TSA.  But with so many parents accepting after-school surveillance (and paying for it), children never learn the sense of outrage that healthy individuals feel in the presence of Peeping Toms.  Instead, they learn to love Big Brother.
Likewise, a big-government political bias shapes their views on current and past events:

  • During a presentation about Gutenberg's moveable-type printing press, a student became upset upon learning that literacy skyrocketed as a result of this invention — not because of public schools.  His mother is a teacher.
  • Trump Derangement Syndrome was widespread among teachers, who frequently vent their political views.
  • When asked about my politics at an otherwise friendly private holiday party, a school counselor revealed a comic-book grasp of and hostility to free markets when I replied, "libertarian-voluntaryist."
  • In the final minutes of my last day teaching, I finally permitted a political discussion.  Some students were attracted to socialism and Antifa's violence, but they were shocked into disbelief when I mentioned that Benito Mussolini, who introduced fascismo to modern politics, was firmly rooted in socialism and communism.  They were further outraged to discover that the Nazi Party was steeped in collectivism and even included the term socialist in the party name, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). 
  • Ignorance about slavery prevailed.  Many believed it was isolated to the United States instead of practiced worldwide for ages.  They were more surprised — even resistant — to discover that the word slave is etymologically linked to the word Slav and white slavery.  Moreover, they somehow "learned" that Westerners were the most enthusiastic practitioners of slavery instead of being among the first to abandon it.
  • In March 2018, Grosse Pointe students walked out of classes to protest the shootings in Parkland, Florida.  This occurred before revelations that the FBI failed to act on tips about the shooter, that school "security" failed to act, that Broward County Public Schools' disciplinary practices played a key role in the shootings, and that the school district tried to cover up its deeds by suing the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper for publishing documents that revealed these facts.  Fortunately, the Sun-Sentinel prevailed in the lawsuit.  The upshot?  This school-approved Children's Crusade was based on superstitions about guns and hostility to constitutional rights.
  • Gender dysphoria is the new frontier in virtue-signaling, but we know that young people experiment with new identities — adopting and discarding career choices, hobbies, and friends as they "try them on for size."  But the gender dysphoria fad requires adherence to a stereotyped view:that certain behaviors are appropriate only for boys and others for girls.  Some children, however, have a powerful need for attention and jump on the latest bandwagon to obtain it.  Others want to please "important" adults.  Shortly after I was hired, a counselor asked me to address one student with plural pronouns to acknowledge the student's gender dysphoria.  This student was too young to make this choice.  He may have been responding to the issue's trendiness and had demonstrated more than once an interest in fringe politics and behaviors — typical teenage stuff.  I believed he was attempting to manipulate adults into playing along — another teenage pastime.  Moreover, he was bright but did not do his homework or study; he didn't even know what a pronoun is!  Since Latin is a highly inflected language, this request would derail the learning process.  Finally, it was completely unnecessary, since I always called on students by name.  No pronouns were needed.  My explanation did not please the counselor, but I continued to treat the student respectfully.

 
Group identity and outrage culture dominate public schools.  Children learn to pose as victims despite enjoying a standard of living unmatched in human history and by 95% of the world's current population.  Instead of learning to function as unique beings with free choice and that the smallest minority is an individual facing a mob, they are swapping a legacy of individual rights for group identities that — unlike individuals — don't bleed and are manipulated by special interests to undercut genuine rights.
If you wonder why students at schools like the University of Michigan cannot tolerate free speech and need trigger warnings and safe spaces, look no farther than public schools.  They are a political Trojan horse — a "free" government "gift" with plenty of strings attached.
Lawrence M. Ludlow provides international location analyses, technical writing, and marketing services to corporate clients.  He holds an M.A. in medieval studies from the University of Toronto's Center for Medieval Studies and has lectured on manuscripts, early printing, and art history at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the San Diego Public Library.

 

 
 
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Here's the original link to the American Thinker story. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/worse_than_ever_government_schools_after_35_years_.html

PRIVATE GOVERNMENT IN LATE-MEDIEVAL GENOA

Late medieval / early modern Genoa is an example of government services "owned" and budgeted by private investors. Historian Matteo Salonia, a lecturer at King's College (London), broke new libertarian ground with his recent book, Genoa’s Freedom: Entrepreneurship, Republicanism, and the Spanish Atlanticby Matteo Salonia (Lexington Books, 2017); 214 pages.  I was delighted to write a book review for Future of Freedom Foundation.
 
I encourage you to explore some of his remarkable findings in the following sources:
 
Future of Freedom Foundation book review by Lawrence M. Ludlow
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/private-government-in-genoa/
 
Tom Woods Show interview
https://tomwoods.com/ep-955-genoa-a-forgotten-history-of-liberty-growth-...
 
Matteo Salonia's book:
https://www.amazon.com/Genoas-Freedom-Entrepreneurship-Republicanism-Ent...
 

Factoids About Nazi Germany and the Final Solution

Nazi Germany Factoids
By Lawrence M. Ludlow
It’s common knowledge that most people living in Germany seem to have been indifferent to abuses suffered by Jews during the years of the Hitler regime, but to what degree? And what was really known about the Final Solution during those years? This isn’t an easy question to answer, and that answer might not be the same from year to year -- even for the same person. After reading several books on communism, Nazism, and prison camps over the years – including Whittaker Chamber’s Witness, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Slavomir Rawicz’ Long Walk, John Toland’s Adolf Hitler, and John V. Fleming’s Anti-Communist Manifesto, among others – I wish I had taken notes on all of them. Since Toland’s and Fleming’s books are the most recently completed, they remain freshest in mind. Here are some of the highlights.
 
Hitler’s Antisemitism
Hitler’s own antisemitism was not a constant phenomenon; it became more virulent and certainly more destructive and monomaniacal once he was infused with political aspirations and power. Two incidents during his early life even seem to offer the possibility of redemption in this regard.
 
First, on Christmas Eve in 1907, when Hitler was in the middle of his 18th year and mourning the death of his mother the day before, he made a visit to Doctor Edward Block, a Jewish physician who had tried and failed to save his mother with an expensive procedure. At one point, Hitler reached out and clutched the hand of Dr. Bloch and told him, looking directly into his eyes, “I shall be grateful to you forever,” followed by a bow. This occurred even though the medical bills were significant: approximately 10% of his mother’s estate. So Hitler was not completely blinded by antisemitism. Many years later, during the early years of World War II, Dr. Block wrote that he believed Hitler did indeed recall that scene in granting him favors not given to other Jews in Germany or Austria. But Hitler seemed to view his positive experiences as highly personalized, exceptional cases that were somehow kept in hermetically sealed compartments – never allowed to become generalized and applied to other Jews.
 
A couple of years later, he was living in Vienna, where he remained for several years, and his circumstances became increasingly dismal until he became a homeless vagrant. During this period, he owned only the clothing on his back and found lodgings at charitable institutional dormitories and, later on, at slightly more private dormitories he found more to his taste. He was able to earn money by painting watercolor postcards and larger paintings and sketches that were peddled in the streets by a fellow vagrant. These sketches and paintings were typically of architectural settings and buildings, and they weren’t bad. Better still, there seemed to be a ready market for them in the streets of the polyglot Vienna of this period. Moreover, his best friend for a time was a Jew, and one of his most avid collectors was also Jewish – a man whose purchases made Hitler’s life more comfortable. But even then, Hitler was developing the antisemitism that drips from the pages of Mein Kampf. Once again, he seemed to view his positive experiences with Jews as somehow exceptions that he never was able to integrate in a more humanitarian world view.
 
Knowledge of the Final Solution
Despite Hitler’s many fulminations against Jews, knowledge of the Final Solution was not widespread in Germany – even in his hierarchy. When high officials (such as Hans Lammers) heard disturbing rumors, they were told any number of lies. They were even shown photographs of workers happily making shoes and clothing. The degree of compartmentalization of knowledge is a surprise to those of us who assume that everyone in the hierarchy knew what was going on. Others, however, found it convenient to lie to themselves or act as if they didn’t know the details. And within his family and circle of close friends, many could not imagine that Hitler (Uncle Adi, as je was called) had authorized the murder of Jews.
 
Some people even built in their minds a father-friendly image of the Fuhrer in which the Final Solution was an example of out-of-control, renegade officials whom Hitler would rein-in if only he knew what they were up to. It’s the kind of excuse you still hear expressed by many Americans when it comes to the nefarious activities sponsored by the U.S. government: “Surely no one I voted for would do something like that.”
 
Later on, one effective technique was to “medicalize” what was going on. The Final Solution was “keeping the “contagion” of Jewry from spreading. And this medicalization was tied up with language that portrayed the Nazis and Germans as victims in need of defense against the all-powerful Jewish conspiracy. Instructively, it resembles the habitual victimology routine of today’s antifa-socialists, who physically attack people whom they oppose. Likewise, after the events of 9/11 many people seemed to think that before 9/11, the U.S. government had been going along peacefully on its way and that America was attacked out of the blue. Here are a couple of quotations made to Martin Bormann (head of the Nazi Party Chancellery) that show both the habit of medicalization and victimization in language:
 

  • “For us, this has been an essential process of disinfection, which we have prosecuted to its ultimate limit and without which we should ourselves have been asphyxiated and destroyed.”
  • “…On the eve of the war, I gave them [Jews and their supporters] one final warning. I told them that, if they precipitated another war, they would not be spared and that I would exterminate the vermin throughout Europe, and this time once and for all. To this warning they retorted with a declaration of war and affirmed that wherever in the world there was a Jew, there, too, was an implacable enemy of National Socialist Germany. Well, we have lanced the Jewish abscess; and the world of the future will be eternally grateful to us.”

There are echoes of this today when psychologists with a political axe to grind hope to dismiss their opponents by referring to them in clinical ways. It makes it easier to de-humanize those with whom we disagree. And even if Hitler’s supporters knew what was going on in Germany, Hitler had reassured them that “it was their own fault,” meaning the Jews, of course. In his most heated moments, Hitler had told his many audiences that an international Jewish conspiracy was responsible for launching a war against Germany. In this reading of world events, it was the international socialists (the Bolsheviks) who were so heavily influenced by Jews and had schemed against the national socialists (the Nazis).
 
Among the general population, ignorance about the Final Solution was not surprising. It was illegal – and punishable by death – to listen to foreign broadcasts. Furthermore, the death camps were all in Poland, planted in empty swaths of land that were miles from inhabited areas and protected from curiosity by signs that warned against being shot on sight. And language itself – as with all government-speak – cloaked more than it revealed. Just as the U.S. Department of Defense is itself a euphemism for what was once more truthfully named the War Department, so the Nazis used political euphemisms such as “special treatment,” the “East,” and “concentration,” “transit,” “labor,” and “PW” camp. Even within these facilities, the crematoria and gas chambers were called “corpse cellars” and “bathhouses.”
 
Concentration Camps
For those who wish to compare conditions in the Soviet camps with those in the Nazi camps – both of which contain their own horrors and dismal realities – Margarete Buber-Neumann offers some insight. Ms. Buber-Neumann was a German communist turned anti-communist. As a German communist (she became one after she had divorced her first husband, Martin Buber), she fled Nazi Germany with her communist second husband, Heinz Neumann, who was also second in command of the German Communist Party. Her husband “disappeared” during Stalin’s Great Purge, and she herself became a resident of the Soviet Gulag and survived. But afterward, at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, she was deported to a German prison.
 
After World War II, she wrote her memoirs as an anti-communist, Under Two Dictators. Then, during a libel trial in Paris (in 1949), she was called to testify as a witness against a French left-communist journal (Les lettres francaises) for making false claims to discredit former-communist-turned-anti-communist Victor Kravchenko. It is important for people to understand that in post-war Paris, communists wore a kind of heroic halo, and there was very little knowledge about or even willingness to believe that Stalin and the Soviet Union were swimming in atrocities such as concentration camps. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had not yet published Gulag Archipelago or his other works, and survivors of the camps were few and far between – especially in the West, where they could publish their memoires. And as a result, leftists were able to pose as heroes (often members of the French Resistance) in contrast to Nazi collaborators. Any claims to the contrary were vehemently denied and ridiculed – or worse. But according to Ms. Buber-Neumann, not only did concentration camps exist in Soviet Russia, but Hitler’s camps were to be preferred to Stalin’s – at lease if barbarity counted for anything.
 
The Warsaw Ghetto and Today’s Anti-Gun Craze
Many have pointed out over the years that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 9 [Toland] through May 16, 1943) illustrates the value of widespread civilian gun ownership in resisting a tyrannical government. It also serves as a warning against the anti-second-amendment stance that appears to dominate the thinking in public schools and certainly among public-school students, who engaged in a fundamentally anti-second-amendment National Walkout Day protest in March 2018.
 
Of the 380,000 Jews originally crowded into the Warsaw ghetto, only 70,000 were left by April 1943. When a force of 2,000 Waffen SS infantrymen with tanks, flamethrowers, and dynamite descended on the ghetto, they were staggered by 1500 Jewish fighters who (after various groups within the ghetto community had resolved their differences over the issue of resistance) were armed with weapons that included several hundred pistols and revolvers, rifles, and Molotov cocktails. Heinrich Himmler expected his final mop-up operation to take only three days, but by nightfall of the first day, his troops had to withdraw! General Jurgen Stroop, the SS commander, couldn’t understand why “this trash and sub-humanity,” who are “cowards by nature,” had not surrendered. The rebels usually consisted of groups of 20 to 30 Jewish men accompanied by a corresponding number of women. In particular, the women were noted for tossing grenades hidden in their bloomers.
 
The Nazis realized they had to systematically approach the ghetto resistance, so they set fire to the area, block by block. The inhabitants preferred to burn alive than suffer capture. According to Toland, they would sometimes jump from windows in the upper stories at the last minute, breaking bones upon impact in the street. And even then, they would attempt to crawl across the street into buildings not yet set ablaze. Eventually, the resisting Jews took to the sewers, and the battle was over by May 16. Of the 56,000 Jews rounded up afterward, some 7000 were shot, and the rest were sent to various camps. There were only 16 German fatalities and 85 wounded reported. But this force of trained soldiers with superior armaments was held off for a month.
 
Unexpected Hero: Konrad Morgen, SS Lawyer
We’ve all heard about various German citizens hiding Jews or employing them in their factories to salvage their lives. But Toland’s biography of Hitler also relates the fascinating story of Konrad Morgen, who became an assistant SS judge and a real thorn in the side of the Final Solution. And irony of ironies, he worked for Heinrich Himmler himself! His faith in the concept of law was so annoying to his superiors that he was posted to the front lines as punishment. But his high reputation led to being transferred to an office that investigated financial corruption at Buchenwald concentration camp. Apparently, the commandant (Karl Koch) was profiteering off of the forced laborers by renting them out to civilian factories and by selling food supplies. Just to show how well kept was the secret of the Final Solution, even among Himmler’s group, Konrad Morgen’s investigation gradually led him to suspect that murders were taking place at the concentration camps. His persistence led him to uncover evidence of embezzlement and the murder of prisoners at time to cover-up the corruption. This infuriated Morgen.
 
As a result, Morgen, his briefcase bulging with evidence, went to Berlin to present his findings to his superior, the chief of the criminal police. The chief became pale upon viewing the records. He had not wanted or expected such diligence in the investigation! So he kicked the can to another superior, who did the same thing yet again, saying, “That’s not my business. Take it to your own boss in Munich.” The process was repeated again, and it eventually was kicked up to Himmler himself, now posted at the Reichsfuhrer’s field headquarters. Denied access to Himmler, Morgen sent a telegram (carefully worded, says Toland) that got through the bureaucratic maze for Himmler to read. Oddly, Himmler then gave him permission to proceed against the camp commandant!  
 
On one hand, this shows an amazing sense of courage and dedication to principle on the part of Morgen: How many people would take the risk of uncovering such a well-kept secret and make a fuss about it instead of just going along and getting along? This is so anal retentive, so “Prussian,” and so very socialistic in a dark-humor sort of way: In the middle of the Holocaust, the architect of the Final Solution, Himmler himself, is worried that somebody is making illegal profits! You can’t make this stuff up.
 
More on Heroes and Villains
As a final note, many readers are already aware of the fate of the SS St. Louis, a luxury cruise liner that set out in 1939 from Hamburg, Germany, and was refused permission to dock at a U.S. port, despite direct appeals to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a result, of the 900 Jews aboard the ship, 250 were condemned to death after the ship returned to Germany. Here are a few more facts about the plight of the Jews among the Allies:
 

  • Neither the British nor the American governments granted sanctuary to Jewish refugees in any meaningful numbers.
  • The Moscow Declarations of 1043 listed Hitler’s victims only by national group – Italian, French, Dutch, Belgian, Norwegian, Soviet, Cretan, and of course, Polish. The World Jewish Congress protested vehemently that the Jews, the main target of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing program, were simply counted as Poles.
  • But there was a stark and noble contrast offered by some nations, including allies of Germany. The Danes defied the Germans and transported every last one of their 6500 Jews to Sweden. The Finns, who were allies of Hitler, saved all but four of their 4000 Jews. And even the Japanese gave sanctuary to 5000 Jews in Manchuria. I’ve personally known some of these survivors from China.
  • The much-maligned Pope Pius XII also deserves recognition. Many still reproach him because of his careful silence, which is so very disappointing but in some contexts understandable. Unlike government spokesmen, he had no army, and unlike many governments, he was under direct threat during the war years since Mussolini was an ally of Hitler. Some of the hostility may even be a result of the Pope’s politics: He viewed the Bolsheviks as a far greater danger than the Nazis, which was a justifiable, but nonetheless minority viewpoint. The passage of time and opening of records, however, has proven his assessment to be correct. Lenin and Stalin (and the Chinese communists) killed civilian populations in far greater numbers than Hitler – by multiples. Nonetheless, despite his early failure to denounce antisemitism, under Pius XII (according to Toland), the lives of more Jews were saved than by all other churches, religious institutions, and rescue organizations combined. He enabled their concealment in monasteries, convents, and in Vatican City itself. Too often it is easier to attack a target for failing to do more even though more obvious targets surround you.

 
 

The Importance of Boundaries and How They Figure in the Sex-Obsessed Realm of Politics

Butler Shaffer is one of the most important libertarian theorists, and his many books and articles have clarified the meaning and vital importance of well-drawn and visible boundaries in creating peaceful human relationships. That's why I mentioned him so early in my new article, "Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Pussy Control." If you found Stephan Kinsella's writings on IP compelling, Butler offers a real learning experience!
 
Among Butler's books are the following:
Calculated Chaos
Wizards of Ozymandias
Boundaries of Order
In Restraint of Trade
 
"Calculated Chaos" explores the problems of poor boundary definition and the link to complexity and chaos theory, "Wizards of Ozymandia" explores the warfare state, "Boundaries of Order" is perhaps his most in-depth writing on boundary theory, and "In Restraint of Trade" is a history of business attempts to circumvent and undermine the free market. You can't do much better than these!

"3rd-Class Relic" from WTC Tours Detroit Suburb

On Memorial Day in St. Clair Shores, a parade of idolaters venerated a 3rd-class relic plucked from the debris of the World Trade Center. The 5-foot steel beam was adored as a 3rd-class relic by the faithful because tradition claims it touched the elbow of a first-responder on September 11.
 
The relic failed to achieve 2nd-class status because the State’s advocatus diaboli demonstrated that no first-responder actually used the I-beam on a daily basis, which is a requirement of 2nd-class status. Only the body of a saint (or part of it) can be a 1st-class relic. Rumor says the holy beam was smelted from Minnesota ore dug from an open pit next to a veteran’s cemetery. Tears were shed at the goading of hectors and costume-wearing acolytes.
 
In the wind-up to the parade, the holy I-beam was on solemn display at the St. Clair Shores Fire Department on Harper Road. No miracles reported. Here's the article from the Macomb Daily.

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