Clueless

The reason people do not know much is that
they do not care to know.

― Stephen Fry

I was scammed last week out of $500; a first, for me.

I received an email appearing to come from the president of an association I belong to. 

She asked me, as a favor, to buy $500 worth of gift cards and send them to a veterans charity on behalf of the association. She was supposedly swamped and couldn't get to it. I'd be reimbursed for my out-of-pocket expense promptly.

I helped her out the following day.

As a volunteer on several nonprofit boards, I receive frenzied requests from other association officers frequently.

Hers seemed fairly routine.

Only when I received a second request from her to send another $500, did I suspect a scam.

My credit card issuer has determined I was duped by a "credible imposter," so I don't feel completely stupid; only partly stupid.

By placing a few phone calls, I learned within moments of sensing a scam that the association's leaders knew for days about the imposters, but covered up their activities from the association's members.

They had also—years ago—posted all the members' names and emails on the association's website, making them easy pickings for scammers.

I informed the president she had committed an egregious breach of trust by exposing members' personal information and then covering up the scam.

But she didn't—and doesn't—get it. 

The term breach of trust means nothing to her. 

She only wanted to know whether to cancel my meal at next month's annual lunch, since I was resigning from membership.

Some folks simply have no business running a nonprofit.

If you are asked to do so, I suggest you first educate yourself—just a little.

It's easy!

There are hundreds of free resources at your fingertips.

Show you care enough to become informed.

Or stay on the sidelines.

You have no business trying to lead.

Federal Court Okays Web Scraping

I've scraped many a website in my time.

"Web scraping," in case you're wondering, refers to the compilation of information that's published on websites.

A few recent examples:

• This week, I wrote a blog post on the birth of art history by web scraping. 
  
  
• Earlier this month, I taught a brainy high schooler how to "speed write" a term paper by web scraping. In the process, I learned more about Shirley Jackson than you'd ever want to know.
  
  
• Last November, I built an e-mail list of insurance executives for a client who had no marketing list.

Web scraping isn't theft.

Theft is what Instagram coach Kar Brulhart faced this week, when a rival ripped off her ideas verbatim and presented them as his own.

Web scraping is research, as a federal court ruled last week.

In the decision, the US Ninth Circuit ruled against LinkedIn, which sued hiQ Labs, a research firm that studies employee attrition.

LinkedIn wanted HiQ to stop scraping its users' profiles.

The court ruled that web scraping doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which defines computer hacking under US law.

Hacking is defined as "unauthorized access to a computer system;" but scraping snatches public data.

The case had reached the Supreme Court last year but was sent back to the US Ninth Circuit for review.

The court's decision is a "major win for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists who use tools to mass collect, or scrape, information that is publicly accessible on the Internet," says Tech Crunch.

Mushrooming

Feed your head.

— Grace Slick

Mommies are mushrooming, reports Harper's Bazaar.

"This is a time of psychedelic renaissance, of mushroom mania," the magazine says. 

"It’s a time when people are increasingly turning to psychedelics not for recreation but for healing—and many of them are parents."

Raising kids apparently so stresses millennial mommies they must take shrooms to cope.

Magic mushrooms—in my youth the illicit leading edge of consciousness-expansion—have become a trendy substitute for tranquilizers.

But "getting high is not the point," the magazine says: better parenting is.

Parenting is rough, after all, a "sleep-deprived, tedious, anxiety-riddled road, recently made all the more difficult by the pandemic."

Ingesting magic mushrooms can counteract the "malaise of modern parenting."

"The mushrooms allowed me to feel vulnerable," one angst-crippled mommy told the magazine. 

Shrooms took her to a "place of peace and love and real clarity."

Research scientists of recent have been keen on shrooms, according to Harper's Bazaar.

"A steady thrum of studies has illuminated the potential benefits of psychedelics in helping with myriad mental-health disorders, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder," the magazine reports.

Two years ago, pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins announced that psilocybin can eliminate depression; while the FDA in 2023 is slated to approve ecstasy for treating PTSD.

So many mommies are turning to shrooms to cope, the magazine says, a nationwide mushroom movement is forming.

Some call the movement "psychedelic parenting;" others, "plant parenthood."

Critics worry that it lacks medical supervision.

But advocates point to the fact that Indigenous healers have used shrooms for thousands of years to heal troubled tribespeople without medical credentials.

Supervised or not, the movement is mushrooming: over 30 million Americans have ingested psychedelics, according to the Johns Hopkins pharmacologists—many of them mommies.

I now understand why I see so many moms in the supermarket talking to the cereal boxes.

Above: Shrooms. Oil on fiberboard. 10 x 8 inches. Score now! 

Hashtags are a Waste of Time (Almost)

Instagram's CEO recently said hashtags are a waste of time, if you use them in the belief that they increase readership.

They don't; they only help Instgram "categorize" your posts.

To verify the CEO's statement, analytics firm Social Insider studied over 75 million posts published between 2021 and 2022.

The firm verified that using a lot of hashtags, indeed, is a time-waster. They don't boost readership. 

At best, the use of a few—six or so—will help make your posts "discoverable."

But piling them on is futile.

Why is that?

Instagram has changed its search engine. 

Users can now enter keywords, instead of hashtags. That means many avoid the hashtags page, preferring to look only at search results.

Should you drop hashtags altogether?

No, says Social Insider.

While readership of your post isn't improved by the use of hashtags, the inclusion of six or fewer hashtags will improve Instagram's ability to categorize your post.

Using more than six penalizes you.

Then He Goes Stage Right

There's an absolute morality? Maybe. And then what? If you think there is, go ahead, be that thing.

— Ricky Roma in "Glengarry Glen Ross"

Perhaps because I've spent so much of my life selling and working with salesmen, I've long thought that David Mamet's 1984 play "Glengarry Glen Ross" is one of the the greatest American plays of the 20th century, surpassed only by Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night."

"Glengarry Glen Ross" depicts the dark side of capitalism, where scrappy salesmen use wile and cunning and ride the backs of hapless suckers.

Though in the minority, I've seen salespeople who are like that. They earn the profession a bad name.

For its realism, “Glengarry Glen Ross" is a masterpiece.

 

But what's up with Mamet?

As reported by The New York Times, the playwright has gone loco, becoming an ardent backer of the conman extraordinaire: Donald Trump.

Now, a playwright backing libertarian causes is questionable enough.

But backing the conman Trump?

It's loathsome.

America's greatest 20th-century playwrights—O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee—were all unequivocally liberal.

Mamet is the odd man out.

And odd he is—or has become.

Appearing on Fox News and HBO recently, Mamet has been mouthing absurd, right-wing theories, the kind you'd expect from an idiot like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

He claims, for example, that all schoolteachers are pedophiles, keen to "groom" young children for sex; that ruthless Democrats "staged" the outbreak of Covid-19; that the media is "statist" and was planning to foment an armed rebellion had Biden had lost the election; and that Broadway has "canceled" him—even though a revival of Mamet's 1975 play "American Buffalo" opened on Broadway a week ago.

Mamet also claims Trump did a "great job" in the White House, and only lost a second term because the election was "questionable."

Mamet first mouthed many of these theories in magazine essays which he's collected under the title Recessional, a book The Wall Street Journal called an exercise in "paranoid didacticism."

The once-liberal Mamet's volte-face isn't new. 

It dates to 2008, when he announced in The Village Voice that he was "no longer a brain-dead liberal." 

In that essay, Mamet defined liberals as "idealists;" conservatives as "tragedians."

Liberals, he said, are "perfectionists" who want to achieve absolute morality; conservatives are realists who just want to "get along with others."

We live in a divided America, Mamet said: "one where everything is magically wrong and must be immediately corrected; and the other made up of people reasonably trying to maximize their comfort."

"I realized," Mamet concluded, "that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace."

Fair enough. Some of us thrive in a marketplace. And none of us likes fussy moralists—unless we're ourselves fussy moralists.

I myself don't prize equitability or diversity over justice and liberty. 

But Mamet's recent rants tell me he has gone off the rails. 

Totally.

And that's a shame.

He's given America many literary gifts.

But in the third act he's ruining his reputation.

April

April is the cruelest month.

— T.S. Eliot

I remember reading "The Waste Land" in college, just so I could say I'd read it.

The poem made little impression on me, despite its reputation as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece and the only 20th-century book to rival James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest work of modernist literature.

One line of "The Waste Land" stuck with me, however. 

The first.

That's because I read separately that, indeed, April is the cruelest month: April is the leading month for suicides.

It's hard to understand depression—the clinincal kind—until you have experienced it yourself; and harder still to understand suicide.

Perhaps that's because, in a real sense, no one experiences suicide.

April is the season of blossoms and regeneration, a joyous occasion for most of us.

But blossoms and regeneration can be painful, because they recall fertile and happy days forever gone by, as Eliot makes clear:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Suicide, on the other hand, is painless.

NOTE: "The Waste Land" turns 100 years old in October. You can read philosopher David Hume's 1755 defense of suicide here. 

Common Sense

It don't make much sense that common sense
don't make no sense no more.

— John Prine

My keyring holds two identical looking keys. 

One unlocks the front door; the other, the back.

Murphy's Law governs my keyring.

No matter which door I'm hoping to unlock, I always choose the wrong key.

That defies common sense.

But common sense is passé, anyway.

Today, we're "structurally stupid."

Or are we?

When I use my housekey, I do so in the firm belief that it will open the lock.

Even though it never does the first time, I believe it will.

I presuppose that turning the key will unlock the door.

Why do I believe so?

Experience. 

Know-how.

Trial and error.

The very same trial and error that underpins science.

I have an inductive means for making judgements about cause and effect in the real world.

Those means aren't perfect, but they're good enough to get me into the house.

They go by the name “common sense.”

No, we're not structurally stupid.

Some of us just prefer to be assholes.

Illth

Americans—Republican voters, especially—romanticize the rich. 

They're held up as titans, when in fact they're just lucky.

The Victorian critic John Ruskin felt that Englishmen of his day were equally guilty of romanticizing the rich—and were wrong to do so.

Rich people hoard, Ruskin argued, taking their wealth out of circulation.

But wealth is only useful in circulation.

"If a thing is to be useful," Ruskin said, "it must be not only of an availing nature, but in availing hands. 

"Usefulness is value in the hands of the valiant."

Ruskin, leaning on his Classics education, defined the "valiant" as the "valuable;" as those who "avail towards life." 

In a word, workers.

Ruskin thought the rich were worse than just idle: the rich are like "dams in a river" and "pools of dead water which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to drown people."

Ruskin wondered why English didn't have a word for the harm caused by wealth. 

He suggested illth. 

Illth, Ruskin said, is the "devastation caused by delay." 

By hoarding their wealth, the rich postpone its use until after their deaths. 

In this sense, Ruskin believed, the rich act as "impediments" to the flow of wealth.

From their great country houses, nothing ever "trickles down."

Ruskin published these thoughts in 1860, 12 years after Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. 

But whereas Marx's essay, published by a small society of fellow travelers, was largely ignored, Ruskin's, published in a popular magazine, created a firestorm.

The English critics despised it.

Ruskin's essay was declared "one of the most melancholy spectacles we have ever witnessed."

"Absolute nonsense," "utter imbecility," and "intolerable twaddle," the critics wrote.

One critic called the author himself "repulsive," adding that Ruskin was the "perfect paragon of blubbering; his whines and snivels are contemptible."

But was he contemptible in condemning the rich for fostering illth?

I don't think so. 

Illth, you could say, is the underbelly of wealth.

Wealth is a 13th-century word meaning "prosperity." It derived from another Old English word, weal, meaning "health."

Ill, also a 13th-century word, came centuries later to mean "unhealthy;" but its original 13th-century meaning was "wicked." 

Illth, therefore, means "wickedness." 

Ruskin's point was clear: when you look at their underbellies, the rich are wicked.

They block our way to prosperity; they don't create it.

Will Republicans ever get it?

HAT TIP: Thanks to copywriter Nancy Friedman for introducing me to illth.

Anger of Repose

Free speech is the right to shout "Theater!" in a crowded fire.

— Abbie Hoffman

After millenniums of suffering second-class citizenship, Western women can take heart in the fact they're at last on equal footing with men. 

You'd think they'd kick back and relax, at least a bit.

But, no.

A lot of Western women are still incensed and, as a result, unable to tolerate a man's literary opinion when it differs from their own.

I ran headlong into that anger yesterday when I (naively) commented on an article posted by the feminist historian Max Dashu on her popular Facebook page, "Suppressed Histories Archives."

The article, by a playwright named Sands Hall, described how Wallace Stegner plagiarized the diary of a Victorian woman, Mary Foote, when he wrote his Pulitzer-prize winning novel Angle of Repose.

Hall's contention was that Stegner stole more than a diary; he stole the diarist's life.

The unanimous tone of the steamy comments by Dashu's fans rankled me. 

I am, after all, partial to Wallace Stegner and to all novelists' right to fictionalize.

Those comments called Stegner "morally bankrupt" and "corrupt," a "colonizer," "thief" and "oppressor" who enjoyed "destroying a woman's character and reputation."

He was also compared to a rapist.

For good measure, Dashu's fans indicted other loathsome males for plagiarizing women's writings, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Jung, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Einstein and Homer.

Yes, Homer.

"I wish Stegner were still alive to be shamed, sued, and stoned," one fan wrote.

Stegner should go to the "chopping block," said another.

"A curse on the name of Wallace Stegner," added another. 

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. 

"Who do we cancel next?" I commented.

Big mistake.

For my five-word comment, I was told I was "petty," "cheeky," "hysterical," "reactionary" and "misogynistic." And I was assaulted for my age—even though Max Dashu is three years older than me.

But wait, there's more. Adding nuance, I commented further:

"Thanks for posting this article. I was not aware before of the accusations against Stegner. There is a good podcast featuring Sands Hall at the link below. She amplifies the article and related play she wrote. Calling for Stegner's posthumous stoning and the retraction of his Pulitzer is a clear-cut form of 'cancellation,' whether the word bothers you or not. Many of the comments sound like those of a frenzied mob clutching to its grievances. Sands Hall calls Stegner's ripoff of Mary Foote's journal an instance of early 'postmodernism.' But the mob wants to exhume his body, like Cromwell's, and desecrate it."

Max Dashu replied, "So according to you, no one should be outraged at him stealing a woman's work and then stomping on her reputation? He in fact canceled her!"

"In the US," I responded to Dashu, "we’re sensitive to mobs after the Salem Witch Trials."

"What 'mob?" Dashu wrote. "A woman tracked down the story of a man who massively appropriated a woman's work while smearing her life story, and you whine about 'cancellation.' He hasn't been canceled. Someone shone a light on his misdeeds."

And at that scolding, Dashu's fans started to pile on. 

"Shut up misogynist," one wrote.

"Calm down, Nancy boy," said another. 

"Robert is mad that women are pushing back," said another.

"I’m sensitive to slandering a woman since the witch trials," said another. "And I’m a witch, so don’t even fucking go there."

"It’s pathetic that you’re so testerical and worked up over this dead guy who stole women’s work," another said. "He STOLE her work and passed it off as his own. Typical male entitlement and privilege on your part to think you get to define everything around you. SHUT THE FUCK UP."

Based on my encounter with Max Dashu and her fans, I could write a play about an fiery mob rushing to judgement. 

Twelve Angry Women.

But it's been done before.

POSTSCRIPT: Learn more about Wallace Stegner's plagiarism from a new interview with Sands Hall. Great stuff!

Stupid Lasts Forever

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.

— Aristophanes

A Tennessee Republican this week held up Hitler as the paradigm of self-improvement.

State Senator Frank Niceley defended a bill to ban the homeless from public parks by invoking Hitler's time as a tramp in Vienna:

"I wanna give you a little history lesson on homelessness," Niceley told his colleagues. 

"In 1910, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. 

"So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses. And then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books. 

"So, a lot of these people, it’s not a dead end. They can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life, or in Hitler’s case, a very unproductive life. I support this bill."

If Niceley wanted to live up to his name, he'd also sponsor a bill to provide Tennessee's homeless with free toothbrush mustaches.

Propaganda

If there is such a thing as "woke propaganda," this meme is it. The meme's creator, intent on convincing you the Founding Fathers embraced diversity, counted on readers' ignorance of Latin.

E Pluribus Unum means, of course, "Out of many, one," not "Out of one, many."

The motto, proposed by Adams, Franklin and Jefferson in 1776, referred to the 13 colonies' determination to form a single, new nation independent from England.

It hardly promoted diversity—especially as that word is most often used today.

Propagandists count on the holes in our education.

Propaganda, from the Latin propagare, meaning to "spread," entered English in the 18th century. 

It was the shortened name of a Roman Catholic organization, the Congregatio de propaganda fide, the "Congregation for Propagation of the Faith."

Propaganda only acquired its modern sense ("the spreading of information") in the early 20th century.

The Congregatio de propaganda fide was housed in Rome in a baroque building on the Via di Propaganda named the Palazzo di Propaganda Fide, the "Palace for the Propagation of the Faith." 

The Propaganda, instituted by the Pope in 1622, comprised a committee of cardinals tasked with spreading Catholicism, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Propaganda's mission derived from a command by Jesus (in fact, his last) reported in the Gospel of Matthew: Euntes ergo docete omnes gentes, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations."

The cardinals hoped to spread the Catholic faith, but it was a follower of Marx, Georgy Plekhanov, who popularized the use of the word propaganda to mean the "spreading of information" (or as we now say, "misinformation"). 

During the late 19th century, Plekhanov wrote essays that called for the tandem use of agitation (speeches) and propaganda (pamphlets) to sway public opinion.

His one-two punch formula was shortened to agitprop by another follower of Marx, Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin argued that while agitation uses slogans to sway public opinion, propaganda uses arguments.

Agitation targets the uneducated; propaganda, the educated.

In either case, the truth gets shortchanged.

"Truth is the most precious thing," Lenin said. "That's why we should ration it."

Hurry, Wisdom

We are at a moment in time where we desperately need to accelerate wisdom.

— Elise Loehnen

With so many things so out of control—inflation, the virus, domestic terror, foreign enemies, and global warming—we are perfectly poised to elect a strongman as president in two years.

That's what fear-filled idiots do.

We need wisdom to steer us, but wisdom's in short supply right now (like a lot of things).

Amazon won't deliver it overnight.

Then again, maybe it will.

Emerson said, "If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."

We should make that the first, perhaps the only, question we ask of a candidate.

Books may not be the only source of wisdom (there's the "school of hard knocks," too); but they're a primary source—and a ready one.

Ezra Pound said a book is a "ball of light in one's hands."

Hurry, wisdom.

Let there be light.

What's Wrong with America

Against one who denies the principles, there can be no debate.

— Aristotle

Breaking my pledge to ignore reactionary loudmouths, I recently reacted to a Facebook post by just such a loudmouth.

He posted a meme blaming the high price of gas on Canada.

Yes, Canada.

When I challenged his unsubstantiated claim, citing the consensus of oil-industry analysts—namely, that Canada is doing its best—he responded by calling me "snarky" and insisting that analysts are all just "spin doctors."

"Facts shmacks," he wrote.

(ICYMI: Canada already supplies the US over 4 million barrels of oil every day, according to oil-industry analysts, who agree the country's oil exports are maxed out because investors refused last year to expand Canada's production facilities.)

Contra principia negantem non est disputandum.

"Against one who denies the principles, there can be no debate."

In America today, we can't agree on facts. 

We can't even agree on that there are such things as facts.

Norman Mailer predicted 50 years ago that America would wind up in this place when he coined the word factoid.

Conservatives dwell in a world of factoids. Trump won. Covid-19 is a flu. Blacks are just immigrants. Disney grooms queers. Canada is denying us oil... and we should nuke them.

Aristotle saw 2,500 years ago that parties who cannot agree on the facts of a case simply cannot reasonably discuss it.

The best the parties can do is name-call.

The 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper believed mankind's greatest enemy was irrational relativism, which prevents our mutual acceptance of facts.

By caving into irrational relativism, "one cannot rationally discuss anything that is fundamental," Popper lamented.

The only way out of the impasse, he said, "lies in the realization that all of us may and often do err, singly and collectively, but that this very idea of error and human fallibility involves another one—the idea of objective truth."

Alas, until every conservative is willing to let go of fear, we're stuck with irrational relativism.

But there is a quick exit from our impasse.

It's the solution to relativism known to philosophers as the argumentum ad baculum ("appeal to the stick"), first suggested by the 11th-century Aristotelian, Avicenna.

Its forcefulness derives from force.

"Those who deny a first principle," Avicenna said, "should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not identical."

I like that solution!

Mouse Trap

Conservative clerics, right-wing pols and greedy fundraisers are whipping their followers into a full-blown frenzy over an alleged, decades-long effort by Disney to "groom" kids to be homosexuals.

"Disney has officially declared itself a woke leader while advancing the rainbow agenda," says Catholic homeschooler Mary Cuff.

Setting aside the whole notion that gays are “groomed” by other gays, I find it strange that, while the Bible devotes only 6 of its 31,102 verses to homosexuality—three in the Old Testament and three in the New—right-wingers spend so much time obsessing over the topic.

What's up with that?

What about the other 31,096 verses? 

Like all the ones that champion love, charity, tolerance, and peacemaking?

And why target Mickey Mouse?

Why not target this creepy guy—a groomer if I ever saw one?

The Forgotten Lem Boulware

Ronald Reagan's insane policies helped create today’s Gilded Age.

— Ben Gran

They are ideologues. I hate ideologues. 

— Philip Roth

Historians credit Ronald Reagan's antediluvian notions of "big government" to the influence of the right-wing ideologue Barry Goldwater.

They've forgotten the more important influencer: Lem Boulware.

Boulware was GE's head public relations man in the 1950s. 

While on the job, Boulware gained a national reputation for extolling laissez-faire, bashing Washington bureaucrats, and bullying labor leaders.

Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of raw capitalism, Boulware insisted.

Nothing.

Boulware's libertarian influence on American businessmen was so pervasive that it endures today, when a nonnegotiable stance—such as the price of a new car—is called an instance of Boulwarism.

The paranoid Boulware believed that American workers, abetted by New-Deal era intellectuals in Washington, posed a mortal threat to the business-owning class—and made no secret of it. He rang the reactionary's alarm bell at each and every opportunity, using GE employees like Ronald Reagan as his shill.

Reagan had befriended Boulware while the Hollywood actor served as the weekly host of "General Electric Theater," one of the nation's top TV shows for over a decade.

As they toured the country hosting press junkets, Boulware took it upon himself to "tutor" the dimwitted actor (Christopher Hitchens once called Reagan "as dumb as a stump" and his deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver told me that he "babysat" the puerile president).

Like a sponge, Reagan absorbed Boulware's Hobbesian views.

America, Boulware preached, was the land of opportunity, private ownership, free markets, and low taxes. 

Anyone who wished to call himself an American accepted those qualities—plus the fact that prosperity trickled down from the "beneficent" 1%. 

Resistance meant you were a goddamn Communist.

Boulware's Gilded Age views were known in Chamber of Commerce circles as the "philosophy of private enterprise."

The gullible Reagan, while traveling with the wily PR man, would listen to his teachings and swallow them whole.

The actor wasn't the only one of GE's 190,000 employees to imbibe Boulware's Kool-Aid during the '50s. 

Tens of thousands did.

The PR man made sure of that by circulating right-wing books among management and publishing four in-house magazines that explained the philosophy of private enterprise; arranging continual in-house workshops on the topic; and deputizing supervisors throughout the company to act as his mouthpiece.

To prepare GE's supervisors to carry his message, Boulware also circulated reprints of articles by the arch conservative William F. Buckley.

Boulware viewed his task as one of re-educating the serfs.

The simpleminded star of Bedtime for Bonzo was merely one of them.

Grammar

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

— B. R. Myers

On a Facebook group dedicated to the prize-winning writer Shelby Foote (a fav of mine), a civil war broke out after I corrected someone who used "hung" to mean "executed." (If a man or woman was executed by hanging, as grammarians know, he or she was "hanged.")

Some group members backed me, but many went apoplectic over my comment, insisting grammar was irrelevant to communicating.

Facebook even banned me for 24 hours, saying "your comment didn't follow our Community Standards."

The irony of advocating sloppy grammar in a group dedicated to Shelby Foote escapes them, as, I'm afraid, do most subtleties.

B.R. Myers is right: sloppy grammar signals a sloppy thinker—or at least a poorly read one.

No, sloppy grammar doesn't prohibit communication.

But it does reflect a pitiable sort of poverty.

The Gnadenhütten Massacre

The news of the atrocities in Ukraine are heartbreaking.

Russians are barbarous, we say.

It can't happen here, we say.

Wrong.

In March 1782, a year before the end of the American Revolution, a band of Pennsylvanians murdered 96 Lenape Indians by smashing their skulls with mallets as they knelt and prayed to Jesus.

In what became known as the "Gnadenhütten Massacre," the Pennsylvanians then piled the bodies of the men, women and children inside a Moravian mission and burned it to the ground.

The murderers claimed they wanted revenge for Lenape raids on their homes.

But the Lenapes they bludgeoned were innocent.

Like Quakers, Moravians were pacifists; so were their Indian converts.

Ironically, the Moravians and the Lenape converts had been helping the Patriots all through the war, working as guides and spies—acts that often got them arrested and tried by the British.

The incident spurred reprisals.

The Lenapes resurrected their practice of ritualized torture—discontinued during the French and Indian War 20 years earlier—and targeted the men who had participated in the atrocities.

As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, "To the war of every man against every man, this is also consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place there."

Many a Slip

There's many a slip 'tween the cup and the lip.

— English proverb

I've always loved this 2nd-century proverb.

We 21st-century folks—quick to shun responsibility—like to say instead, "Shit happens."

But the ancient proverb puts the onus on the individual, not the universe. 

The individual is where the slip so often begins.

Business people are always slipping up: dropping the ball, laying an egg, spoiling the party.

It seems to worsen every day.

Of course, a lot of us have too much to do. 

But a whole lot of us are just plain sloppy and unprofessional.

As my parents would say, "You can't get good service anymore."

Please don't contribute to the problem. 

Instead, today, try to:

• Show up
• Call back
• Keep the appointment
• Follow through
• Pay attention
• Speak plainly
• Be honest
• Offer to help 
• Find an answer
• Keep your promise

And, for god's sake:

• Don't send me a survey every time I interact with you.

Chances are, it will reach me when I'm in a foul mood.