Misc – KMZ Digest

Do you know the Ten Cannots?

itsme — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 21:24:05 +0000

Lawrence W. Reed

“That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.”

_{William J. H. Boetc}_ker _{(1873–1962)}

There’s a lot of valuable and timeless wisdom in that one sentence! Its author was William J. H. Boetcker, who died at 89 in 1962. Born in Germany, he emigrated to America as a young man, became an ordained Presbyterian minister, and gained a national reputation as a superb public speaker. He also said, famously,

“A man is judged by the company he keeps, and a company is judged by the men it keeps, and the people of democratic nations are judged by the caliber of officers they elect.”

I recently learned of Boetcker and his short essay, “The Ten Cannots,” published in 1916. It was widely circulated while he was alive and is the one thing he is probably best remembered for. Its core principles are well worth taping to your refrigerator. If you’re a politician, get them engraved on both your lectern and your heart. And if you watch tonight’s presidential debate, make a note each time one of them is violated:

What a difference for the better these truths would make if every citizen took them to heart and lived up to them. Think about it.

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty. He previously served as president of FEE from 2008-2019. He chaired FEE’s board of trustees in the 1990s and has been both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

fee.org/articles/do-you-know-the-ten-cannots

ADA30

itsme — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 22:00:19 +0000

30 Years After the Americans with Disabilities Act,

There’s Still Work to Be Done

A student makes his way through the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles. The university has eased barriers to enable students and guests with disabilities to access classrooms and dorms. However, many public places remain difficult for people with disabilities to access. Photo by Kirkikis/iStock.

Jennifer McLelland

December 2, 2022

As an abled parent of a disabled child, I’m learning to help my son manage accessibility burdens because our communities and institutions aren’t designed with him in mind. We can do better for children with disabilities by building more accessible, more inclusive communities and by teaching them how to assert their rights in situations that aren’t in compliance with the law.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990 and forms the foundation of disability integration into employment and public spaces. The ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and requires that public spaces be made accessible to people with disabilities.

But the mechanism of enforcement relies on people with disabilities filing individual complaints and lawsuits – the system as it exists delegates a collective responsibility for accessibility onto the people who are excluded. The result is that, even though the law requiring accessibility for public spaces is more than 30 years old, many places are still inaccessible for people with disabilities.

During the first few years of my son’s life, he had several medically complex health issues and life was overwhelming – my focus was on keeping him alive. I didn’t have the bandwidth to pick fights over accessibility, so when things weren’t accessible, we just didn’t do them.

As a child with medical complexities, my son took a few years to learn to walk well enough to get around. The process of him learning involved several different walkers, along with a stroller to carry his medical equipment. The ADA rules that are in place to make public spaces accessible for wheelchairs should have made more spaces workable for strollers and walkers – but they didn’t. I threw out my back more times than I can count trying to balance a crying, fragile child in one arm and 40 pounds of equipment in the other.

Jennifer McLelland, right, with her husband, Justin, and children James and Josephine. Photo courtesy of Jennifer McLelland.

What did I do to solve the problems in those early years? I leaned hard into abled privilege and tried to steamroll my way through them. I figured out a 40-pound backpack system that could carry his oxygen, suction machine, feeding pump and all his gear with me on the move. As a small child learning to walk in a world that constantly tripped him, he fell constantly. And with forty pounds on my back I had a hard time picking him up.

My next solution was Crossfit – if he was going to get heavier and still need to be carried, I would just have to get stronger to keep being able to lift him. I love being strong – but I was wrong in thinking that I could powerlift a solution to his need to interact with the world.

As Americans we tend toward individual solutions, even when structural solutions would do a much better job at fixing things. The ADA has existed for my son’s entire life, but it’s still up to us to figure out whether or not a location is going to be accessible. The process of figuring out accessibility concerns in advance places a time and planning burden on people with disabilities, and the amount of pre-planning that is required to do basic things that abled people take for granted is immense.

Now that I’ve given up on being a bulldozer mom, I’m learning how to be more assertive about accessibility needs, and at the same time teaching my son how and when to pick a fight over accessibility. In scenarios where there is likely to be pushback, I take the lead as the adult. In scenarios like the movie theater, where staff is (usually) trained and compliant with ADA requests for closed captioning, I nudge him to make the request.

Our major accessibility concern recently has been less about the built environment and more about the way we all behave in public spaces. The lack of COVID-mitigation strategies in most of public life creates a substantial accessibility burden for children and youth with medically complex disabilities. Children like my son are at much higher risk for death and serious illness from COVID-19 than children without underlying medical conditions. To pursue their right to an education, medically complex children have to either accept the substantial risk of COVID transmission in classrooms with unmasked, frequently sick and symptomatic classmates or opt out of in-person school entirely. It’s in scenarios like these – where the potential for harm is high, but the pushback on accommodations is frequently hostile – that I don’t have any good guidance to give him.

The curb-cut effect, a phrase coined by Angela Glover Blackwell, a civil rights advocate, refers to the way programs originally intended to benefit people with disabilities actually turn out to benefit society as a whole. Her initial example is how curb cuts – the small ramps built into sidewalks to allow for wheelchairs to roll smoothly down – make life easier for pedestrians, bicyclists and families with strollers. The kind of reasonable accommodations under the ADA that make life run smoothly for children and youth with special health care needs work in much the same way. If we look at the accommodations that children with disabilities need as being part of inclusive and universal design, rather than looking at them as special requests, we can all end up with better solutions.

Jennifer McLelland has a bachelor’s degree in public policy and management from the University of Southern California and a master’s degree in criminology from California State University, Fresno. She worked for the Fresno Police Department in patrol for eight years. She is currently a stay-at-home mother and paid caregiver through the In Home Supportive Services program. She is active in advocating for disability rights and home- and community-based services.

Thecalhealthreportx.org/2022/12/02/analysis-30-years-after-the-americans-with-disabilities-act-theres-still-work-to-be-done

What We Lost in the War on COVID

itsme — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 20:32:30 +0000

Daniel Dal Monte

August 22, 2024

The news cycle moves so quickly these days that we can forget to dwell on major events. But tyranny thrives on a short attention span.

Just a couple of years ago, we witnessed government dictates turn the entire world into a highly regimented military encampment.

A Military Response: The Role of the National Security Council

Ongoing research has revealed that the response to COVID-19 shifted early on from the public health authorities to the military. For instance, the then deputy national security advisor, Matthew Pottinger, in November 2019, appointed Deborah Birx to spearhead the COVID response.

Pottinger had no experience in public health but knew Birx through his wife, who worked at the CDC. Birx admitted in her congressional testimony that the National Security Council had recruited her for the position on the COVID task force. Birx was an immunologist and an Army colonel who had worked on AIDS research but had no experience in epidemiology or novel airborne respiratory viruses.

It appears as though the National Security Council, which is responsible for foreign policy and protecting the nation, took over the development of the pandemic response protocols, scrapping those already established by public health officials. According to a March 13, 2020, document titled “PanCap Adapted U.S. Government Pandemic Response Plan,” the National Security Council was entirely in charge of policy development for the COVID response. PanCap stands for “pandemic crisis action plan.”

Debbie Lerman, a persistent investigative journalist on the pandemic response, points out that the adapted PanCap shifted the implementation (distinct from the policy development) of the pandemic response away from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The National Security Council (NSC) ran policy, and FEMA became the lead federal agency on the interagency cooperation necessary to implement the policy.

This shift in power from public health authorities to military management helps us understand the exceptionally blunt and one-dimensional response to the COVID pandemic —that is, the “quarantine-until-vaccine” response. I want to highlight here three aspects of the pandemic response that flagrantly violate standards of medical ethics.

Bad Medicine

First, the COVID response coming from NSC insisted that a vaccine was the only proper response to the virus. Alternative treatments—so they told us—were largely ineffective at best, and dangerous at worst. The insistence on the vaccine as the unique panacea to COVID was the basis for the mandates coming from all sectors of the economy because if there were alternative treatments, we would not all have to receive the vaccine.

For instance, authorities dismissed the idea that natural immunity was sufficient protection, equal to or better than the vaccine. Therapies like ivermectin suffered ridicule and severe warnings, even though now a massive number of meta-analyses attesting to the efficacy of this drug against COVID have been published.

Instead of offering an array of viable treatments, the militarized COVID response insisted on “quarantine until vaccine” for the entire population. We could not go to work, the gym, or even to a restaurant, unless we took the vaccine, which wasn’t even available for a year after the pandemic was declared.

This heavy-handed approach, characteristic of a wartime response instead of a sophisticated public health strategy, violated the medical ethics principle of beneficence. Beneficence refers to the duty of acting for the good of others: We cannot merely refrain from harming people, but we must actively help them when they are in distress, especially when we occupy positions of public trust, as do physicians. Beneficent people seek what is best for the other, like the good Samaritan in one of Jesus’ parables.

By insisting on a crude quarantine-until-vaccine military strategy, pandemic response leaders did not act in our best interests. Someone truly motivated by beneficence will use all the options available to help someone, particularly if those options have low risk. When someone is drowning, a beneficent person will not arbitrarily refuse to use, for instance, a life preserver, or other lifeline, or to at least call for help, but instead insist on only using a helicopter for the rescue.

A beneficent medical professional will not provide just one option for therapy (especially one that isn’t yet available) when there are multiple low-cost, low-risk therapies available. To push just one therapy, one must have selfish, not beneficent, motives. A drug manufacturer would not be beneficent if it pressured doctors to prescribe only its medication when others are also available.

The quarantine-until-vaccine policy had a high cost for the population, with questionable benefit. The forced quarantine caused kids to miss school and people to lose employment. The vaccine was a novel product with little track record for safety and efficacy. Indeed, vaccines in general are complicated and often have no effect on mutated forms of the originally targeted virus.

On the other hand, natural immunity and ivermectin had a much better risk-to-benefit ratio. Anyone who has already had the virus has natural immunity, and the WHO classifies ivermectin as an essential medicine that any functioning health system must keep in stock.

With a novel product like the COVID mRNA vaccines, the government should have adopted a precautionary principle, waiting to see the early effects on willing trial participants of the vaccine to ensure its safety, rather than immediately imposing mass vaccination.

‘Follow the Science’

Secondly, the quarantine-until-vaccination strategy also showed a naïve confidence in the effectiveness of one strategy for an entire global population. Careful clinicians recognize that the practice of medicine is not like following a cookbook. Evidence in medicine is not a universal algorithm, providing an exact solution to a very complex problem for an entire population.

Philosophers of medicine have noted that a single complete algorithmic and infallible methodology for fixing medical problems is not possible. The scientific method reaches microsolutions for particular contexts, not general solutions. We cannot provide objective ranking for different types of evidence, and oftentimes it is hard to extrapolate evidence to new contexts. Medical evidence is pluralistic not monolithic, but the militarized COVID response applied a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Government officials continually blasted us with claims that “the science says,” as if the scientific method were some omniscient, unambiguous oracle instead of ongoing discovery.

Big Brother

Finally, the militarized COVID response showed a complete disregard for patient autonomy. This response exercised hard paternalism, a form of paternalism in which an authority takes away decision-making from someone who is fully competent. No one could make their own medical decisions during COVID, even highly educated and healthy people.

Hard paternalism is an authoritarian style of leadership that is foreign to American democracy and our culture of respect for the individual. We do not accept the idea that Big Brother knows best, nor should we accept such egregious violations of medical ethics like those characteristic of a military response.

intellectualtakeout.org/2024/08/what-we-lost-in-the-war-on-covid

Democratic Party’s choice of Harris was undemocratic

itsme — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 20:03:22 +0000

− and the latest evidence of party leaders distrusting party voters

Daniel Klinghard

Could the primary system – a feature of presidential politics for more than 50 years – be weakened by the Democrats’ choice to elevate Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket without a competitive nominating process? That may seem unthinkable to voters who have grown up with a democratic primary system, but party nominating contests have, in the past, similarly cut voters out of the process.

Primaries have an inconsistent history in the U.S., as I learned in my research on political parties. When party leaders have seen it as being in their interest to give voters more influence in the primary process, they have done so. When they believed that less-democratic methods could lead to a better chance of victory in the general election, they have done that, too.

You may not know that when you vote in a presidential primary, you aren’t technically voting for the candidate, but for delegates pledged to vote for that candidate at the party’s national convention. Even when a candidate gets enough of these delegates to win, their candidacy becomes official only when the delegates vote at the convention.

This year, something unusual is happening, because almost all of the delegates who were elected in the primaries to vote for Joe Biden are instead voting for Harris – despite the fact that she was not on any primary ballot.

When delegates, not voters, picked the nominee

When the parties adopted the nominating convention as a means of selecting presidential candidates in the early 19th century – the first Democratic National Convention was held in 1832 – delegates to the national conventions were selected at local and state meetings, and then those delegates chose the party’s nominee.

Sometimes, the convention picked candidates with a lot of popular support, as when Republicans selected war hero Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. Sometimes, they picked someone most voters had never heard of, as when Democrats nominated Franklin Pierce in 1852. And sometimes they chose a “favorite son” who was chiefly popular in an influential state, such as Michigan’s Lewis Cass, who won the Democratic nomination and went on to lose the general election in 1848. And often, voters had the sense that the delegates were used as bargaining chips between influential party leaders.

Primaries were based on the idea that voters should have more say in the choice of nominees. Some states and cities experimented with direct primary elections for lower-level offices in the late 19th century, but they were first applied to presidential nominating conventions in 1912.

_{Delegates to the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where a fight was waged between two presidential contenders: Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy. Humphrey won the nomination and lost the election. Donaldson Collection/Getty Images}

For a brief moment during the Progressive Era – approximately 1901-1920 – a growing number of national convention delegates were selected through primaries, while the remaining continued to be selected through traditional party caucuses and conventions.

In 1912, 42% of GOP national convention delegates were selected in primaries, as were 33% of Democratic delegates. In 1916, the figures were 59% for the GOP and 54% for the Democrats – a sign of the growing popularity of this democratic reform.

That moment was short-lived, as 1920 marked the beginning of a long decline. In that year, the GOP percentage of direct primary-elected delegates declined to 58%, and the Democrats’ percentage declined to 45%. By 1932, the numbers had declined to 38% and 40%, respectively, and the party elites had more influence in both parties for the next 36 years.

A little this, a little that

After that, it was “democracy lite” for the presidential nominating system. Parties entered what political scientists call the “mixed system,” which lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s. Some convention delegates were selected in the meetings that had been the norm in the 19th century, even while a few were selected in primaries. Outsider candidates could get attention by competing in primaries, but they could not secure the nomination by doing so.

The friction between these two approaches reached a peak in the embarrassing Democratic National Convention of 1968. Delegates elected in primaries and pledged to vote for Robert Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy were outvoted by delegates who supported Vice President Hubert Humphrey, whom party elites believed was more electable. Humphrey went on to lose the election to Richard Nixon.

To avoid a repeat of that debacle, Democrats appointed a commission to rewrite rules for delegate selection in time for the 1972 convention. The McGovern-Fraser Commission recommended that more delegates be selected by primaries than by caucuses or conventions, making the nominating process more open to voters. In short, they aimed to end the mixed system and ensure that most convention delegates were selected in primary elections.

As they implemented the new rules, giving the choice of the presidential nominee to voters, they rewrote Americans’ understanding of party democracy as popular, open and diverse.

These democratic expectations have been slowly undermined in the years since. Party leaders have often had doubts about the voters’ ability to pick candidates likely to win in the general election.

These doubts, for instance, were behind the Democrats’ creation of superdelegates in 1984. This gave convention votes to Democratic governors, members of Congress and members of the Democratic National Committee – among others – specifically to act as a check on Democratic voters.

While there were never enough superdelegates to outvote the regular delegates pledged to vote for specific candidates, the expectation was that they could provide enough votes to elect a candidate preferred by political elites over a candidate popular among party faithful but likely to lose the general election.

Over time, party elites – officeholders, activists, donors and campaign professionals – have come to figure out ways to assert power in the nominating process. These influential elites throw endorsements, funding and attention to a chosen few.

A lot of political scientists have focused on the way these folks effectively decide which candidates are most likely to succeed, shaping the primary election long before the first voters tune in and the first votes are cast.

To see this in action, look no further than the role that party insiders played in staving off a primary challenge to President Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election and the role big donors later played in convincing Biden to drop out of the race by threatening to withdraw campaign contributions.

Democrats less democratic

(Getty Images)

When Biden announced his decision to drop out of the 2024 race, many delegates who were elected in primaries specifically because they were pledged to vote for him declared their intent to vote for Harris. With Biden out of the race, they are free to vote their conscience, and no other candidate has emerged to challenge Harris.

But for the first time since 1968, the Democratic nominee will win the nomination without winning a single primary vote. This may not be as much of a democratic backslide as that of the previous so-called “mixed period.” But it would be a culmination of the elite-oriented trends that have shaped the nominating process since 1984, in which party elites have played an increasingly large role in shaping the presidential nomination.

This is not to add to the frequently heard concerns that democracy is in decline. It does mean that the Democratic Party’s nomination process this year is less democratic than it was in 2020 when Democrats held a vigorous primary contest, even in the midst of a pandemic, or even the Republican Party’s process this year when Donald Trump was challenged by four opponents, including Nikki Haley’s failed but spirited primary campaign.

If Democrats are committed to a democratic nominating process, they could learn from the experience of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. They could acknowledge the democratic deficit in the 2024 process and revisit the rules by which the primaries are governed.

Otherwise, one lesson of 2024 might well be that a democratic primary system is not essential to successful presidential candidates.

The politicians in smoke-filled rooms will warn that primary challengers weaken incumbents and might cost the party its electoral ambitions in the general election. They’ll worry that acknowledging the glaring undemocratic nature of the 2024 process will weaken Harris against Trump.

But if Democrats truly want to make this election about democracy, they might start by looking at the recent trends in their own house.

theconversation.com/democratic-partys-choice-of-harris-was-undemocratic-and-the-latest-evidence-of-party-leaders-distrusting-party-voters-236002

What Happened to American Civics?

itsme — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 20:03:52 +0000

Charles Krblich

August 12, 2024

_{depositphotos.com
Photo by trongnguyen}

My son’s school assigned a civics project for summer vacation. The project’s scope is expansive and spans from explaining the history and functions of the three branches of government to creating a flip book of landmark Supreme Court cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v Board of Education. One of the tasks is a minor level of civic participation, either through community service or writing a letter to his Congressman. My assistance has often been required, and I’ve been given a chance to revisit my own civics education against the anti-democratic themes of the recent world, including pandemic lockdowns and political coronations.

The civics project starts with having the students research and document the basic foundations of democracy. The text of the project begins whimsically: “Once upon a time…The Magna Carta was the first document created to limit the ‘Evil King’ John’s power in Britain (the year 1215).”

It continues through the English Bill of Rights, and the Mayflower Compact, and finishes right before the US Revolution with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the philosophies of the Enlightenment thinkers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Montesquieu. From this history, the philosophies of the social contract, natural rights, and the separation of powers became the foundations of our US Constitution.

This historical foundation was followed by a topic on Citizenship. My son had to outline the ways a person could become a citizen, but more importantly, detail the obligations and responsibilities of a citizen. Obligations consist of things that would find us facing prison time if we ignored or rejected; things like not paying taxes or not following the law. Responsibilities are things like community service or voting.

As I’ve assisted my son with this project, I’ve found my train of thought drifting off, and I find myself thinking about all of the things I’ve recently been wrong about.

I suppose that my understanding of a Citizen’s duties and the presumed preference for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has created a bias in me that is no longer all that relevant.

For example, I expected a widespread rejection of lockdowns. I could not have predicted a forced-masking regime to occur, much less thrive, in a free country. I was sure the history of racial segregation in the US would prevent something like vaccine segregation from ever developing. Despite all the talk of “Threats to Democracy,” I did not expect a major party to sacrifice their primary candidate, whatever that candidate’s flaws, and simply appoint a new one; the alleged appointment occurring only a month before the nomination process and in lieu of holding any democratic primary.

Since the Ron Paul days of 2007, I have been far more inclined to view the two major parties as functionally similar; that there is only one larger party in control of things which many refer to as the Administrative State. They are neither elected nor fired, and the peaceful transition of power may rearrange the deck chairs, but otherwise, it doesn’t present any challenge to their status or power.

This aspect of things is not mentioned in Civics education. My son’s project does not have a topic addressing the three-lettered-bureaucracies. There is certainly no textbook ever produced that would explain how the CDC was granted the power to forbear rent, mortgage, and student loan repayments. I have yet to find in the texts of the US or State Constitutions enumerated powers to shut down gyms and schools among other businesses.

I was wrong, I think, because I still retain many of the default presumptions from my own civics education: in particular the concepts of the Rule of Law and the many lessons from history.

Without common ideas, there is no common action, and without common action men still exist, but a social body does not. Thus in order that there be society, and all the more, that this society prosper, it is necessary that all the minds of the citizens always be brought together and held together by some principle ideas.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Shared ideals are the foundation of any society, and we can observe a recent example of a shared idea constituting itself into a social body and then prospering. Social Distancing — a term that no one had ever heard before — was an idea that spread faster than the disease it was meant to slay. The rise of this idea created all sorts of new social orders and even superseded the prior social contract.

The purpose of my son’s civics education is to instill basic common ideals of what a citizen is, what the basic process of government is, and the philosophy of why those things are important. So, what happens when those rules no longer seem to apply?

Maybe East Berlin presents a relevant example. If an East German citizen was born at the right time, our citizen could have lived through the regimes of a monarchy, a republic, national socialism (Nazis), communism, and again a republic.

Anna Funder, in her book Stasiland, demonstrates the power of propaganda on a citizenry. Immediately after the communists took control of East Berlin and East Germany, the citizens were no longer Nazis. They never were. They were always Communists. It was the West Germans who were the Nazis. This message flooded the airwaves and the newspapers and people eventually came to believe it, just as the duties of their citizenship changed in distinct ways under each of the various regimes they had lived under.

I can’t help but think that, to a degree, this is what we are living through. The ostensible forms of our government are all still present. There is a congress, judiciary, and president, but everything else is different; all the rules have changed.

A citizen’s duties are therefore malleable and directed not by common shared ideals, but by directions handed down from above; directions that determine proper social etiquette and expected behavior. In this way, tens of millions of people can come to believe that freedom and democracy mean backroom appointments and good citizenship means wearing a mask.

Tocqueville says it better than I:

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people…

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The old, aristocratic colors of government may be breaking through. Certainly, when the news media advances along a particular track, their influence becomes almost irresistible, and public opinion will eventually yield to it. In yielding, the duties of the citizenry are transformed as well.

^{Photo credit: Statue of Liberty Tour.com}

For now, though, I help my son. I recite off the expected answers to his civics project and point out where he is wrong. I probably bore him by discussing the philosophies and history in more detail. At the very least, he learns the old rules; Rules that were created by thinking men at the height of the Enlightenment period, and not the new rules — which might more closely resemble the more ancient rules — created by men concerned with the acquisition of power.

The civics lessons are not unimportant. The central doctrines of individual liberty and tolerance resulted in more than 200 years of both — yes, turmoil — but more importantly, immense prosperity.

In our own turbulent time, categorized by many popular delusions, will we return to the Enlightenment ideals of natural rights, separation of powers, limited government, and liberty? Liberty — above all — the value that precedes all of the others.

This article is reprinted from Brownstone Institute where it appeared under a Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0). It first appeared on the author’s Substack.

intellectualtakeout.org/2024/08/what-happened-to-american-civics

Bureaucracy Doesn’t Allow Courage

itsme — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 21:34:13 +0000

Crosses set up to honor those who lost their lives during the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas on November 8, 2022. (Photo by Mark Felix / AFP) (Photo by MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP via Getty Images)

May 27, 2022

Annie Holmquist

The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, has shifted dramatically in the last few days from the horror of young lives needlessly snuffed out by a gunman, to the horror of why more wasn’t done to save them. Finger-pointing and blaming abound, particularly toward the police who responded to the shooting. Video footage and firsthand accounts have left many wondering why officials were so slow to respond and save the teachers and children who eventually died at the hands of the shooter.

We can rant and rave and shout “coward” or “defund the police” as many on Twitter are doing in the face of such a tragedy. Or we can also stop and consider that these people may simply be products of a bureaucratic culture in which no one can move, think, or act without following official procedure … which therefore greatly hinders the display of courage and initiative which once was so characteristic of America.

“Courage,” Aristotle told us in Nicomachean Ethics, “chooses action or endures pain because this is the noble course or because the opposite course is disgraceful.” As stories continue to emerge about what went on in the Uvalde shooting attack, there seems to be a recurring theme regarding courage. Thus far, the ones who showed true courage seem to be those who weren’t acting in an official capacity: the parents and those officials who were off duty but came to the crime scene anyway.

Jacob Albarado is one of those officials. Albarado, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent, was sitting in a barber chair when he heard about the shooting, The New York Post reports, but he didn’t allow his off-duty status let him off the hook. He raced to the school and began evacuating children. Another Border Protection agent, the one who eventually stopped shooter Salvador Ramos, was also off-duty.

Many parents also courageously attempted to get into the school and save their children, regardless of the risk to their own lives. Unfortunately, those who did so were detained by police, one mother ending up in handcuffs and one father pepper-sprayed and tackled by police as he headed for the school.

Where was the courage of those officially trained to respond to the situation—the ones who were equipped with bulletproof vests and guns of their own? In pondering this question, it’s helpful to consider what our society has become.

The off-duty Border Patrol Agent who reportedly killed the mass shooter at Robb elementary school in Uvalde is pictured on the left.

There were many unsung heros that day from teachers to first responders. We thank you for your service and sacrifice. #HonorFirst #BackTheGreen pic.twitter.com/JR3Le6MNeS

Mayra Flores Vallejo (@MayraFloresTX34) May 26, 2022

Today, when any crisis occurs—be it a shooting or even something as simple as a debate in a college classroom—there is constant criticism of how the individuals involved acted. If they didn’t act on something, they’re blamed (as in this case). If they did act, they are also blamed—for the fact that they used a gun, or didn’t treat a minority with sensitivity, or used the wrong pronouns, or some other inane reason that is so common these days. Thus, we get a situation where people are paralyzed in crisis because they know that in some way, the powers that be will crush them regardless of whether they show courage or not.

Hannah Arendt described the situation well—both with regard to violence and our response to it—when she wrote that “The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence.” The problem, she explained, was that “In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted.”

Arendt goes on to write, “Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

Hence, we see the situation where frantic parents couldn’t get the police to go into the school, or even let the parents themselves go in. The police were stoic, likely trying to follow official procedure. Why should they risk their lives in courageous acts or let parents do the same when to do so would risk their necks by crossing official bureaucratic procedure no matter which way they turned? And thus everyone in this situation was sorely hindered in their freedom and power to act.

We have a legitimate reason to bemoan the failures and apparent cowardice of those who are supposed to protect us. But when we do, we should realize that a greater force is at work. When we have a bureaucratic government that watches every step and plans every move of its officials, then we can kiss courage—and initiative and all the characteristics that we admire during a crisis—one big, long goodbye.

—

intellectualtakeout.org/2022/05/bureaucracy-doesnt-allow-courage

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3 Missteps of the Education System According to Mike Rowe

itsme — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 21:54:41 +0000

Annie Holmquist

October 24, 2023

^{Image credit: “Ready for a Dirty Job” by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region on Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Image cropped.}

Everybody loves Mike Rowe. His matter-of-fact sense of humor, his humility, and his willingness to get involved in the many work sites featured on his “Dirty Jobs” show make him an endearing figure.

But Rowe is also very intelligent. He has his finger on the pulse and problems of America in a way that many others often don’t recognize. Take the recent interview he did with Nick Gillespie of Reason in which he discussed how the missteps of the education system produced a generation of entitled young people who turn up their noses at blue collar or low-paying work.

The absence of shop class is the first misstep Rowe raises. “The rift in our work force and the labor shortage we’re seeing today can be walked right back to the moment we decided to take shop class out of high school,” Rowe said. “So many things followed that as a result.”

_{Photo by el alce web on Unsplash}

Those blessed enough to remember the days when shop class was a regular part of the high school curriculum know that it was the reason many young men stayed interested in school. Physical movement, a key need for young males, was permissible and even needed in shop class. The class also cast a vision for the types of real-world work available for young men to begin their course in life as providers and leaders. And it was in shop class that young men could actually see the skills they learned in math and science class used for practical purposes.

Remove shop class from school, and many young men are left listless, feeling like they’re dumb and unable to adequately function as profitable members of society.

The second misstep of the education system Rowe discusses is the dismissal of minimum wage work. We’ve given students “the idea that we think the lower rungs on the ladder are somehow less important,” Rowe said. “So many arguments attempt to take an entry-level job that was never designed to generate enough income to support you and belittle that opportunity because it’s not a higher rung.” As a result, Rowe said, “A lot of people coming right out of college don’t want to waste their time on the lower rungs. There’s an impatience with it, and that’s really a shame because the things you can learn on the lower rungs are manifold.”

Photo credit: Amazon.com

As someone who climbed the career ladder from intern to editor, stopping at many different levels on the way up, I agree. Starting as the low-man on the totem pole often gives an employee an appreciation for his job and salary, as well as a greater humility in his work, than one who landed a high-level, high-paying job from the get-go. When schools fail to teach students that it’s okay to start small and work their way up to success, they often set students up for disappointment and failure.

Finally, Rowe backhandedly points out a third misstep of the education system in the following observation: “Look, what our country needs are more welders who can talk intelligently about Descartes and Nietzsche. And what our country needs are more philosophers who can run an even bead.”

In making such a statement, Rowe hints that today’s schools are not training students to truly labor with their hands or their minds. Circumstantial evidence agrees, as recent man-on-the-street interviews show that schools turn out many young people who don’t know how many states are in the U.S. or even how many dimes are in a dollar. Yet Americans could once enter the workforce with only an 8^thgrade education and still run rings around today’s students in their knowledge of classic literature, philosophy, and history.

Which brings us to our current education system. If we’re truly serious about giving students better opportunities, then we will bring back not only shop class, but a course of academics teaching students how to think and become life-long learners, instead of simply filling their minds with the drivel known as diversity, equity, and inclusion. Furthermore, we will teach them that there is nothing wrong with hard work or starting at the bottom, for such humility is the best foundation for strong success.

The sooner our schools teach these Rowe-esque lessons in practicality, the better off we’ll all be.

Annie Holmquist

This article appeared first on OAKMN.org under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license.

intellectualtakeout.org/2023/10/missteps-of-the-education-system

Judy Heumann

itsme — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 20:40:24 +0000

1947-2023

Disability rights advocate Judy Heumann transformed my sons’ lives — and mine

_{Disability rights advocate Judith Heumann sits for a portrait in Washington, D.C., May 11, 2021.
Photo by Shuran Huang/The Washington Post via Getty Images}

Michelle Buzgon

March 7, 2023

The ‘mother of the disabilities rights movement’ profoundly impacted my family

My kids lost one of their greatest champions this week.

Though a world-traveler renowned and revered for her trailblazing disability rights activism, the inimitable Judy Heumann took an intimate interest in the lives of so many people — our family included.

I have my 20-year-old disabled son, Judah, to thank for my friendship with Judy. Judah has an extremely rare genetic mutation that science didn’t even identify until 2015, and wasn’t diagnosed in Judah until 2018, at age 16. Because of my advocacy for ways to better include him in our Washington, D.C., synagogue’s religious school, and in the shul community at large, I was asked to join the inaugural Inclusion Task Force at our synagogue, Adas Israel, which Judy would co-chair. Up until our first meeting, I’d had only an inkling of what a big deal she was. I’d seen her around shul, said hello, perhaps chatted a bit, but now I understood that I was in the presence of a disability rights legend.

Persistent, gentle, relentless, nudge — these are all words I’ve heard to describe Judy, and they completely square with my experience of her. Though I’d never been a particular fan of the phrase “special needs,” the word disabled didn’t exactly roll off my tongue. But Judy told me it was important for Judah to claim the disabled identity as he grew older in order to gain more awareness of his needs and advocate for them. She pushed my thinking forward in so many ways. She didn’t always agree with the decisions we made for Judah, especially about whether an inclusive school setting was best for him or how soon we should transition him into one. Sometimes she made me doubt myself, but I knew she spoke up because of the potential she saw for my son.

_{The author’s son Judah in front of a mural featuring disability activist Judith “Judy” Heumann.} _{Courtesy of Michelle Buzgon}

Just two weeks ago, as I dined with Judy at Sababa, an Israeli restaurant near her home in Washington, D.C., I got a taste of what it’s like to dine with a celebrity. When we weren’t being interrupted by friends and admirers, we laughed over shared plates of smoked trout salad, beet hummus, fried cauliflower and chicken livers (her idea!). As always, she asked tons of questions about my two children and challenged me to think even bigger for Judah’s future.

“All I know is what he did at his bar mitzvah,” she said, repeating a common refrain I had heard from her since April 2016, when Judah made clear his strong commitment to Judaism in front of hundreds of people at our synagogue.

Judy actually wasn’t able to attend the bar mitzvah — she had been swept away on a trip to China in her role as special advisor for international disability rights at the U.S. State Department — but she made time later to listen to every word of the audio recording made in the sanctuary that day.

There, she heard his d’var Torah — delivered in the form of a back-and-forth conversation with the rabbi, in order to help his words be more clearly understood — his chanting of the Rosh Chodesh maftir and of eight p’sukim of the haftarah. She even got to belatedly witness the magical moment that occurred when another of the rabbis read the energy in the room and invited everyone to stand up to bless the moment with a Shehecheyanu, because even those who didn’t know Judah were totally present for him that morning. Judy understood what Judah had accomplished.

She also never left my 17-year-old, Simon, out of the conversation. As we consider our next steps for Judah when he finishes high school this year, she also wanted to know what colleges Simon had applied to and what he thought of each option. Simon has left no doubt that he recognizes Judy’s impact on his life. He blew us away with a heartfelt, unprompted Instagram tribute to her and her role in supporting his right, as a student with ADHD, to accommodations in schools. She did it through the sacrifices she and other activists made to put teeth into Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. “I owe so much to her,” he wrote, “and the only thing she ever acted like I owed her was a handshake and a kiss on the cheek.”

Judah had other thoughts about Judy’s requests to give or get kisses. (“Will you lean down so I can give you a kiss?” she would often say.) Judy always respected a reluctant Judah’s self-advocacy, but that never stopped her from asking every time she saw him. Only recently did he finally allow her to give him a kiss, but make no mistake about how he feels about her. Judah lights up with every mention of her name and has always felt so proud to know her, and to know how much she cared about him. When we heard that she was gravely ill, he said, “I’m worried about her.”

There are countless people closer to Judy than we were. She has touched lives around the world. But I experienced and watched time and time again how Judy made people feel special, and I’ve nowk read many more stories illustrating this. She invited you to sit with her, she sent texts to make sure you had followed up on a lead she gave you, she cared enough to push you to do better, to be better. As her star rose in the wake of the Oscar-nominated documentary film Crip Camp and her books, Being Heumann and Rolling Warrior, I felt sheepish about asking for her time. She was kind and generous enough to agree to meet with my book club, where she charmed the pants off of everyone. And after I finally followed her edict to call and make a dinner date, she reassured me. At that dinner two weeks ago, she said I was being silly. “I love your family,” she said.

About a month ago, at the end of the kiddush during our shul’s Shabbat celebration of Jewish Disability, Awareness, Acceptance & Inclusion Month, Judy pulled out her phone and said she really wanted a photo with my family. We all wanted the picture but were feeling a bit uncomfortable about using the phone publicly at shul. Just then, a young woman starting to work in the disability rights field who had come to the service just for the chance to meet Judy jumped up and said, “I’m not Jewish. I can take the picture!” We laughed and then took multiple versions until we were all satisfied that we had captured the image the way we wanted it — all of us tucked in close. Unfortunately, I kept forgetting to ask her to share the photo with me, so it remains stored away on her phone, and we are left only with the memory.

My whole family is deeply saddened by the news of Judy’s death, which is truly a loss for the broken world that she never stopped trying to repair. On Shabbat, the day Judy died, I had entered the sanctuary and noticed a wheelchair in her usual place and anticipated walking over to greet her. Then, to my disappointment, I realized that it was someone else. Just moments later, I heard the news. I’m sure that at shul, my eyes will continue to turn toward that spot, only to be reminded that she’s gone.

Many of her incredible accomplishments will live on — in the law, in the lives of the disabled, and in the hearts and actions of everyone she loved and inspired. My heart goes out to her beloved husband Jorge, the rest of her family, her wonderful caregivers and her dearest friends. May her memory and her legacy be for a blessing to us all.

To contact the author, email opinion@forward.com.

forward.com/opinion/538955/disability-rights-advocate-judy-heumann-transformed-my-family

‘Best friends I ever had’

itsme — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:35:46 +0000

Willie Mays’ treasured bond with a Jewish family

Mays, who died June 18, 2024 at 93, counted Jacob Shemano as a friend and financial advisor — and golf coach

By Louis Keene

June 19, 2024

Willie Mays, left, with Jacob Shemano and the Dodgers’ Leo Durocher. Courtesy of Gary Shemano

Willie Mays was in the prime of his career in 1963, but his finances were a mess. The Giants’ star outfielder had plunged into debt amid divorce proceedings, and even with more than half of his career home runs under his belt, was staring down bankruptcy.

Then he met Jacob Shemano.

Shemano was a banker whose kid, Gary, was shagging fly balls during warmups that day at Candlestick Park. They connected in the locker room afterward, where Mays asked Shemano to help him smooth out his money problems. Shemano agreed on one condition: He wouldn’t take a dime for his work.

What began with Shemano rescuing Mays from bankruptcy evolved into a close friendship that spanned generations and made Mays an honorary member of sorts not just in the Shemano family, but also in the San Francisco Jewish community. Mays in 1964 told the San Francisco Examiner the Shemanos were “the best friends I’ve ever had in my life.”

“Anything that we did, Willie was here,” Gary Shemano, now 79, recalled by phone Tuesday, hours after 93-year-old Mays died. “He was close to the Jewish community because of my dad.”

To some it might have seemed an unlikely pairing: Shemano, a Conservative Jew who had immigrated from Russia as a toddler, and Mays, a Black man born and reared in coal-mining, rural Alabama. But both had overcome the odds against them as minorities to find success. Shemano was one of the first Jews in California to receive a charter to run a bank. Mays played in the Negro Leagues as a teenager prior to Major League Baseball’s integration.

Shemano had a civil rights bent — he insisted on hiring Black tellers for his bank — and in Mays, he had found a stylistic peer. Shemano favored green velvet shirts and Mays steered a pink Cadillac around the Bay — including on trips to his Jewish friend’s home.

“The kids in the neighborhood all knew when he was at Shemano’s,” Gary recalled.

^{Mays, 34, with Rhoda Shemano and Gary Shemano, 20, during Mays’ baseball career. Courtesy of Gary Shemano}

The founder of Golden Gate National Bank, Jacob Shemano did squeeze something out of his new friend: Mays became a celebrity ambassador for the business. He was universally popular, a star in the field and at the plate, a perennial winner with a carefree smile.

The slugging center-fielder was helpful when Gary and his brother Ritchie took dates to the ballpark, too. They’d call him up and give him the girl’s name in advance, and Mays would toss them a signed ball as he ran onto the field.

When Gary enrolled at the University of Southern California, Mays would swing by the dorms if the Giants were in town playing the Dodgers.

“Let’s go shopping, get your ass out of bed,” Gary recalled Mays telling him. “We had so much fun.”

As good as he was with a bat — Mays retired behind only Babe Ruth for career home runs, and his 660 still ranks sixth today — Gary described Mays as an awful golfer. The elder Shemano taught the slugger how to play.

“He said, ‘Jake, how can this game be so tough when the ball’s not moving?’” Gary said.

The relationship ultimately ingratiated Mays with the Jewish community. Shemano once took Mays on a visit to the local Jewish Home, Gary said, and Mays later made visiting there a habit.

^{Gary Shemano with Willie Mays in 2022. They’re holding a photo of Mays with Gary and his mother Rhoda.
Courtesy of Gary Shemano}

He appeared at Jewish community events so often that Mays was eventually invited into the local Concordia-Argonaut Club — a Jewish social club — as the first Black member, according to James Hirsch, author of the biography Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend.

And while Mays frequented the Shemano home on holidays, there was one Jewish delicacy he couldn’t handle.

“He loved my mother until she made him eat some smoked salmon on a bagel for Thanksgiving and he couldn’t swallow it,” Gary said. “It was hysterical.”

Gary said that Mays’ short-term memory was fading when he last visited, about six months ago. There was a photo of Jacob Shemano, who died in 1979, and his wife, Rhoda, on the wall.

“The day that my grandmother died, my father’s mother, he called my dad,” Gary recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t know what to do for you, but, you gonna go to the game tonight?’ My dad said, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘Well, I’m gonna try to do something for you at the game.’ He hit three home runs.”

Correction: The original version of this article misstated Willie Mays’ rank today in the list of career home runs. He is sixth, not fifth.

forward.com/news/sports/624832/willie-mays-obituary-jewish-friendship

Louis Keene is a staff reporter at the Forward covering religion, sports and the West Coast. He can be followed on Twitter @thislouis.

Atlas Shrugs Twice:

itsme — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 21:57:09 +0000

Individualism Among Incompetency and Injustice

June 10, 2024

Image credit: public domain

One fateful day in March 2020, the incompetent men shut down the world with lockdowns. It was the opposite of the premise in Atlas Shrugged. Who is John Galt? Who cares? The incompetent people could stop the motor of the world too. Atlas shrugs either by disappearing competence, or by an overwhelming mass of incompetence too great even for Atlas’s broad, strong shoulders.

^{U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin}
_{Manila, Philippines July 30, 2021}

Competency crises seem to be brewing left and right and are constantly on public display of late. Consider the self-interested testimony of Fani Willis. Jared Bernstein, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, caused an interview to go viral by struggling to explain monetary policy. Several previously 100% effective COVID vaccines have been withdrawn from the market (Johnson and Johnson, AstraZeneca). Lastly, consider the inspiring image of our own Secretary of Defense triumphantly marching off his plane in the Philippines wearing his COVID mask and face shield. It is not-so-reminiscent of the image of General MacArthur triumphantly marching onshore at Luzon to liberate the Philippines. It is difficult to observe these things and think, These are competent individuals.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur wades ashore at the Philippine island of Leyte on Oct. 20, 1944. US Army photo.

In Ayn Rand’s novel, the competent individuals who build businesses, products, and industries all go on strike and suddenly disappear. The resulting world becomes increasingly bleak. Government takes a larger role. Simple things start to break. Less value is provided and at the same time everything is more expensive. That sounds much like the world we begin to find ourselves in today.

Rand witnessed all of this herself. She was born in the city of St. Petersburg in pre-revolutionary Russia, the daughter of a pharmacist. After the revolution, her father’s pharmacy was nationalized and they fled to Crimea which was under White Army control during the ensuing Russian Civil War. Afterwards, they returned to St. Petersburg and were forced to live under desperate conditions. Nearly starving, she was granted a visa to visit Chicago. She managed to stay in the US and chose to leave her family behind. She watched as incompetent men destroyed her father’s business, needlessly broke up her family, and repeated this disaster society-wide.

Meanwhile, we can read and laugh about recent trends like quiet-quitting, which may be a darkly alternative concept of Galt’s Gulch. Regardless of competency, people can disappear and simply collect a paycheck. Rather than compete, the goal becomes optimizing work-life balance and pursuing passions outside of work. If competent people begin to do only the bare-minimum, is it any wonder that customer service or quality control always seem to be on the decline everywhere we look?

The outcome is always the same: incompetence spreads. In many cases incompetence becomes celebrated. In 2021, Fauci was awarded the Dan David Prize for “speaking truth to power” during the pandemic. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was given an international Emmy for his “masterful” pandemic briefings. Today, where do both stand?

Governor Cuomo’s Emmy was eventually stripped from him after he was forced to resign in response to sexual harassment allegations against him. Fauci is admitting to The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, that much of the rules for social distancing and masking were simply made up. Lying, in spectacular fashion, is “masterful” and “speaking truth to power” only in clown world. In reality, it is neither.

Maybe, in the upcoming election, we will see Kamala Harris decry the Trump vaccine and claim she never took it. You see, it was the convicted felon Trump’s vaccine and the ineffectiveness and severe side-effects were known to all. There will, of course, be video of her being injected, just as there is a video of her at the Vice Presidential debate where she states that she wouldn’t take a vaccine Trump told her to. It is only a coincidence that the Pfizer vaccine was approved in early December, just a little more than a month after the election in November 2020.

I have long thought that the correct solution to all of this is to not participate, to only focus on what I can immediately control. I imagined that if the Von Trapp family could avoid Nazism and flee across the hills as shown in The Sound of Music, then I would be able to as well. It all seemed so simple. I spent little time contemplating how precarious and close to disaster their situation truly was.

Ayn Rand, on the other hand, fled with her family to Crimea with the White Army. It failed. They were returned to St. Petersburg, Russia. Her parents perished in the city renamed as Leningrad, Russia in 1941 when the Nazis began their Siege of Leningrad.

People pay far too much attention to the charade presented on their television screens. Individuality is lost; energy is squandered. The conflicting messages, hypocrisies, and our own inability to do anything about it affect us in ways that are often not conscious.

I felt the way he looked. His was one of helplessness, frustration and indignation—but he could do absolutely nothing.

— Ayn Rand, speaking about her father in the wake of the 1917 Communist Revolution

How many of us felt this way at the announcement of lockdowns? How many resisted? How many still believe? What does any of it mean?

Rand’s father, however, did not give in. He refused to work for the Soviet Government, even if it threatened his family’s food security. He helped his daughter escape to America, and he encouraged her to follow her own dreams.

Atlas may shrug, justice may never be served, all of the structures and institutions around us may fall into disrepair or collapse, and the world may be forcefully locked-down, but when we give in to apathy and shrug our shoulders in dejected acceptance and passive participation, we also hand over our own individuality, agency, and freedom. It is then that Atlas shrugs, not once, but twice.

—

intellectualtakeout.org/2024/06/individualism-among-incompetency-injustice

This article is republished with permission from the author’s Substack.

Misc – KMZ Digest

Do you know the Ten Cannots?

﻿

“That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.”

What a difference for the better these truths would make if every citizen took them to heart and lived up to them. Think about it.

ADA30

30 Years After the Americans with Disabilities Act,

There’s Still Work to Be Done

What We Lost in the War on COVID

A Military Response: The Role of the National Security Council

Bad Medicine

‘Follow the Science’

Big Brother

Democratic Party’s choice of Harris was undemocratic

− and the latest evidence of party leaders distrusting party voters

When delegates, not voters, picked the nominee

A little this, a little that

Democrats less democratic

What Happened to American Civics?

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Tocqueville says it better than I:

Bureaucracy Doesn’t Allow Courage

3 Missteps of the Education System According to Mike Rowe

Judy Heumann

1947-2023

Disability rights advocate Judy Heumann transformed my sons’ lives — and mine

The ‘mother of the disabilities rights movement’ profoundly impacted my family

‘Best friends I ever had’

Willie Mays’ treasured bond with a Jewish family

Mays, who died June 18, 2024 at 93, counted Jacob Shemano as a friend and financial advisor — and golf coach

Atlas Shrugs Twice:

Individualism Among Incompetency and Injustice