A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
It’s been happening for a long time, and now seems to be gathering critical mass: the entrepreneur and job creator and agent of local charity having enough of hostile bureaucracy and punishing regulations and gross ingratitude—and then moving. Yes, there are alternatives and options, and they are being chosen.
Once upon a time in the Big Apple, for example, finance had to be physically proximate to Wall Street and Big Banking. No mas. Bandwidth—of the ethereal 5G kind—has made mincemeat of the need for commerce to be geography-dependent. Take that new reality, marinate it in toxic-ideology rhetoric and covetous threats by the prevailing Democrat Socialist power brokers, and the result is—Florida, here we come. And: We’ll be moving so fast the door will not hit us in the heinie on the way out.
So say the billionaires. And the millionaires. And it seems too the thousandaires. Coal-mine canaries all, just with different-sized 401(k)s.
Seems like we have arrived at an inflection point. Stay tuned.
Just What the Doctor Ordered!
1. At The American Mind, Kate Bierly and Thibaut Delloue explain the ways to fix the failed teacher-education model. From the article:
At Stanford, we weren’t taught about the science of reading or what knowledge children should learn. Rather, we read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a radical polemic that rejects the teaching of received knowledge as oppressive and envisions schools as drivers of political activism. This intellectual lineage explains why Critical Theory and its offshoots such as the 1619 Project, which is riddled with historical inaccuracies yet was taught in 4,500 classrooms in a single year, have become so dominant in American public education. At our alma mater, the influential education professor Jo Boaler has led efforts, backed by debunked research, to remove algebra from California middle schools while simultaneously building a consulting enterprise that charges schools thousands of dollars to implement these same “reforms.”
All of this points to a simple conclusion: education schools will not be reformed from within. A machine built on a flawed foundation cannot be repaired by replacing a few parts. And we should not expect universities to solve the problem. They are the problem. When it comes to any attempt to impose accountability on their classrooms, the reflexive posture of college faculty is “Leave us alone.” The declining value of schools of education is an opportunity for states to look elsewhere for teacher preparation.
2. At City Journal, Stu Smith reports how the Democratic Socialists of America are redefining public office. From the piece:
The approach of these “socialists in office” differs markedly from our usual expectations of politicians. Instead of treating activism as subordinated to elected office, DSA officials see activism as the purpose of office. They fold protest, organizing, support networks, and mutual-aid efforts into the practice of governance.
That tendency is not restricted to the panelists. The DSA often invokes an “inside–outside” strategy, seeking to advance policy both within formal institutions, such as public office, and outside them via sustained grassroots pressure. Many of the DSA’s elected officials were groomed for leadership because of their activist backgrounds. They have a foot in both worlds. Within DSA circles, this dual role is sometimes described as the “organizer-in-chief,” a term borrowed from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns.
This blurring may be easier precisely because DSA is not a formal political party. It does not bear the same level of electoral accountability for policy outcomes that the major parties do. Thus, it can function simultaneously as a political faction and as movement infrastructure, providing its elected officials with greater room to test strategies that challenge institutional constraints and build power.
3. At The Giving Review, Julia Nelson wonders if today’s philanthropists would have funded the Underground Railroad. From the reflection:
Leaving aside the threat of punishment under the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, would the Underground Railroad have passed the “can-it-scale?” test with so many of today’s funders?
As my boss Bob Woodson has been patiently explaining for decades, what scales about the most-effective grassroots solutions to social problems are the operating principles, not the structure of the intervention, nor even necessarily the specific content of any curriculum that has been created or utilized. Anyone who has not done so should check out his book, Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles, where he discusses these in detail: competence, integrity, transparency, resilience, witness, innovation, inspiration, agency, access, and grace. These principles are not inculcated in traditional credentialing programs and do not correlate with wealth or education level, so they are largely invisible to conventional study.
The Underground Railroad provided a service, but the local circumstances and constraints were incredibly varied and constantly changing. A standard operating procedure of “follow the river” wouldn’t scale in communities without a river, but the operating principle of “understand local geography and figure out how to best leverage it” certainly did.
4. At California Policy Center, Ed Ring claims that state bureaucrats suffer from climate overreach. From the analysis:
All of this became nearly impossible, thanks to interference in the form of hyper-regulatory oversight that effectively eliminated nearly all of the practices that had prevented California’s forests and wildlands from turning into tinderboxes. Trees and scrublands became overgrown, with the vegetation dried out and stressed not because of “climate change” but because natural and prescribed fires were suppressed at the same time any other form of thinning was all but banned. More than any other single factor, environmentalist extremism has caused California’s catastrophic wildfires.
Rather than admitting their culpability for the entire disaster, the wiped out homes, lost lives, and ensuing economic cataclysm, California’s state legislature blames oil companies. This entire charade is a prime exhibit of why climate change alarm in California has become, more than anything else, a scam designed to deflect responsibility for bad policies and to redistribute wealth and power to bureaucrats who haven’t shown the slightest evidence of learning from their decades of negligent opportunism.
5. At World Magazine, Candice Watters discusses the one job that only moms can do. From the article:
Still, it persists. Examples of influencer and entrepreneur moms doing it all, curated for social media, leave average moms discouraged. Young moms need role models—women in their church whose lives they can study up close and imitate. How many women have never had that kind of support? How many might make different decisions about work if they did?
That’s not to say moms can only do one thing, but that for a season, outside work should diminish. The Proverbs 31 woman was industrious and profitable as a mom, but not at the expense of her primary responsibilities: her home, her husband, and her children. This message makes many women cringe. And yet, some young moms are saying out loud that they want to prioritize these things. That’s a good, God-given desire the church should encourage.
Still, even when new moms don't want to work the same way they did before they had children, often they feel like they don’t have a choice. I tried being all-in on my career, from home, with our firstborn. It was harder than I expected. By the time our second arrived, intermittent freelancing was the most I could do. By reducing our spending, my small contribution was enough to supplement my husband’s salary so that we could live below our wants but within our needs. It was a pleasing division of labor that was highly beneficial to our children.
6. At Cluny Journal, Nathan Dragon reflects sweetly on paintings, and sons, one here but in a different way. From the essay:
S also likes to look at a print of a painting hung up above our bed called Halloween Dogs, Salem by Yetti Frenkel. There’s few kids and a handful of dogs in costumes in the Commons. There’s an obligatory witch—Salem . . . there’s a basset hound angel, a flower-petalled mutt.
He likes to look at it before his mom feeds him, when he’s eating, and after he eats when he’s having what we call his night thoughts.
The real painting is hanging in the hospital where Henry and S were born. We first saw it around with Henry. We saw it every time we went to see him. He had to be in a different room, floor, building than us. A room that specialized in helping his heart function. Henry had to stay in the CICU. He passed away due to a kind of de novo gene occurrence. I don’t know the right language for this, how to use it in a sentence. He had a gene that was “de novo.” A new gene that just happens. It wasn’t inherited from either of us. It helps me to think this way.
Henry isn’t here in the normal sense. But he’s with me all the time. It helps, because I need it, for me to think and to feel this way and to know it is this way. I say he’s here and I feel him here because he will always be a part of me and a part of my little family. A son’s DNA can stay in his mother’s brain for a lifetime. And I’m lucky enough to spend every day with his mother and his brother—and him, too, still living materially, chemically, and lovingly in his mother’s brain.
7. At Commentary Magazine, Orson Scott Card warns that the greater threat to humanity is not AI but . . . stupidity. From the article:
In these early stages of AI experimentation, the focus is on how it seems able to provide written and imagistic material indistinguishable from the work that can be produced by human hands and minds. But note my use of the word “seems.” As an editor and writer for more than half a century, I have a more than passing acquaintance with good prose, bad prose, good thinking, bad thinking.
And though I was able to conceive of an almost supernaturally functional AI in my work, that is not my experience, or any of our experiences, in practice. Whenever I’ve seen anything AI-generated, when I dig down into the details, it proves misleading, unclear, or simply wrong. AI is like a musician who composes nothing himself but merely samples the work of many other musicians and then auto-tunes the bits so they’re all in the same key. That’s not composing, unless Dr. Frankenstein “composed” his monster.
The reason people think AI must have written anything that sounds like high-quality writing is that the teaching of writing in America is so execrably bad that even computerized crap writing sounds better. So when a good writer came along—and, however rarely, they do come along—the college instructor was shocked and dismayed. No student of his could write so well!
8. At Cana Academy, Andrew Ellison expresses distaste for the Greek word salad preferred by some classicists. From the critique:
“If we want to understand the concept of happiness, we have to go back to the Greek notion of eudaimonia . . .”
No, we don’t. The English language has this perfectly good word for happiness. It’s “happiness.” English has had and used this word for centuries, and for centuries English-speaking men and women have thought and spoken about happiness without any reference to the Greek notion of eudaimonia, nor to any Greek notions whatsoever, with the possible exception of the state of contentment that arises from a charcoal-grilled lamb pita and a cold glass of retsina.
The first attested, written occurrence of the word “happy” in English dates to the fourteenth century, but its origins are much older than that, being derived from the same Old English root (HÆP) that gives us “to happen” and “happenstance,” It is in this early sense of chance, fortune, of something occurring neither by design of man nor God, and only secondarily, after the development of centuries, does “happy” come to mean something GOOD which has occurred by chance or fortune; and with the passage of still more centuries of use, the primordial sense of chance disappears entirely from the word’s connotations, leaving only a positive state of good feelings and individual welfare.
9. At Law & Liberty, Michael Auslin sees baseball and hears mystic chords of memory. From the essay:
For me, however, it isn’t figures on the scorecard, but rather the history, culture, and lifecycle of baseball that make it our greatest communal activity. As the late Yale president and MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti reminded us, baseball begins in the spring, when everything is reborn, and leaves us in the fall, to face the cold winter alone.
Baseball is an entire culture, with its endless lore and colorful lingo. Among professional sports, it was baseball that first inspired great novels, like those of W. P. Kinsella and Bernard Malamud; serious histories, like those of Robert Creamer and Charles Leerhsen; or truly insightful criticism, like that of Roger Angell or George Will, not to mention irreverent exposés like that of Jim Bouton.
Baseball’s exquisite balance between individual effort and team play perfectly encapsulates American society. Nothing can happen until the one individual at the mound pitches to the one individual at the plate, even as eight other defensive players wait in anticipation. The beautiful ballfields, whether on the North Side of Chicago or in North Platte, Nebraska, are a link to the open land that we often lose sight of in an ever-more digitized and urbanized world.
10. At The European Conservative, John Rosenthal focuses on Nazi-salute selectivism. From the piece:
As ought to be self-evident, it is only possible to clearly recognize a Nazi salute, or what Germans call the ‘Hitler salute,’ in live action or in a video, but not in a still image. In a still image, anyone waving or beckoning—even, say, hailing a taxi—may appear to have been giving the Nazi salute when they were not. In certain still images, given other congruent elements, we can safely assume that those portrayed are indeed giving the Nazi salute. Thus, for example, in the historical photograph below, we can safely assume that the assembled Wehrmacht officers are not just waving to the Führer. But, otherwise, without such congruent elements, we cannot know from a still image if an outstretched right arm is a Nazi salute or not. . . .
The question is all the more pressing because the Bavarian protestor was in fact explicitly using her poster to point out the fact that sometimes an outstretched arm is just an outstretched arm and, furthermore, to point out the hypocrisy of German authorities in treating the outstretched arms of dissidents, nonetheless, as Nazi salutes but not the outstretched arms of government officials.
11. At RealClear Education, Professor Samuel J. Abrams lambasts the use of the commencement lectern as a pulpit. From the article:
The classroom is not my soapbox, and the lectern is not a pulpit. As the credentialed adult in the room, my asymmetric authority over grades, recommendations, and the social temperature of the seminar means that when I tip my hand, I do not start a debate—I end one. Quiet students get quieter. Dissenting students self-censor. The bright young conservative, the observant Muslim, the Orthodox Jew, the first-generation skeptic; they read the room, calculate the cost, and stop talking. What I gain in the warm glow of moral self-expression, I lose many times over in the room’s intellectual life. Neutrality, properly understood, is not cowardice. It is the precondition for a real argument, the promotion of authentic viewpoint diversity, deep engagement, and meaningful learning.
The same logic scales up to the commencement stage. A graduation is not a faculty meeting or a teach-in. It is a civic ritual that belongs to thousands of families, many of whom traveled across the country, who hold every conceivable political view, and whose children spent four years and six figures earning their place in those folding chairs.
12. Oh Baby: At National Review, Hector Chapa abhors the growing dehumanizing language infecting medicine. From the piece:
As a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, I value the accuracy of medical terminology. Terms such as “embryo” and “fetus” have a necessary place in the realm of clinical education and biological research, providing a standardized framework for scientific study. However, when these cold, clinical labels are imported directly to the bedside, they act as a barrier rather than a bridge. Applying sterile terminology to direct patient communication diminishes maternal reality, treating a woman’s child as a specimen to be monitored rather than a person to be loved.
About a year ago, I was called to our ultrasound suite by our ultrasonographer to assess the heart rhythm of a child in utero. After a detailed evaluation, we concluded the survey was normal. The sonographer reflexively told the patient, “It’s okay, your fetus has a normal heart tracing.” The patient looked at us with a surprised expression and responded, “You mean my baby is okay, right?” That subtle exchange in terms, that one-word substitution of our “fetus” for her “baby,” stopped me in my tracks.
True bedside manner requires a language that recognizes the humanity of the patient, both mother and child, ensuring that the miracle of new life isn’t lost in the language of researchers.
Lucky 13. At The Spectator, the great Bill Kauffman waxes against our lunacy. From the beginning of the piece:
We Americans have been instructed to burst our buttons with pride over Artemis II’s drive-by of the Moon. But out here in cratering America, far from Mission Control, we remain buttoned-up.
This is not due to our skinflint nature or lack of imagination; nah, it’s just that Big Science—“corporate socialism,” as the late parsimonious populist Democratic senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin termed the space program—is spiritless, mechanical and inhuman.
In their distaste for massive undertakings—National Greatness, in DC-speak—members of the Leave the Moon Alone caucus are heirs to Henry David Thoreau, who said of a previous exercise in National Greatness: “As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.” (Ol’ Hank may have slightly overestimated the degree of agency enjoyed by the workmen and conscripts of ancient Egypt.)
Bonus. At Front Porch Republic, Mel Livatino explains the saddest word combo. From the essay:
No, the pair of words I am convinced is the most sorrowful pairing in the English language applies to the entire gamut of human existence from birth to death, though we usually don’t catch on to the sadness that lives in these syllables until we are in our later years. And then it is nearly always a truth we know only silently—in our hearts, not our thoughts: a truth we fail to articulate even to ourselves, let alone anyone else. Very likely, we turn our faces away because we cannot bear the sorrow of this inevitable truth: that the saddest pair of words in the English language is the phrase never again.
The phrase does not begin life sad. Indeed, it usually begins life bringing relief. I’ll never again have to sit for a math test. I’ll never again have to take orders from that SOB. I’ll never again have to look at that face (and, oh, how many such faces there are). I’ll never again have to fix (and, oh, how many things need to be fixed). There is nothing melancholy in these never agains.
The sadness that lingers in never again does not come to us when we are young. And unless we are paying very close attention or are extraordinarily unlucky, the sadness in these words does not reach us even in middle age. The sorrowful truth inside this phrase bides its time. Only when love has built its nest in our hearts does never again reveal its true depths.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Roundtable, the late Karl Zinsmeister, editor of the old Philanthropy Magazine, is remembered. Read it here.
Due. At The Giving Review, Joanne Florino does likewise. Read it here.
Tre. At Philanthropy Daily, Jackson Green shares his dad’s fundraising wisdom. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What is an astronaut’s favorite meal?
A: Launch.
A Dios
The Semiquincentennial is coming up fast. There’s going to be a run on firecrackers and weenies, so stock up. And don’t forget the pickles.
May He Who Merits Genuflection Instill in Us a Spirit of Gratitude,
Jack Fowler, who sends out thank-you notes from jfowler@amphil.com.
