Darkest Hour

England's policy of "appeasement"―letting Hitler grab neighboring lands with impunity―provides the backstory of Darkest Hour, the new biopic about Churchill and Chamberlain.

As we watch the media under attack by right-wing Republicans, Churchill's warnings about the dangers to freedom of the press are as relevant today as they were in his time.

And so are his actions to sidestep thought control.

During the 1930s, Chamberlain favored appeasement, for an extremely practical reason: his party's rule hinged on the votes of working-class Britons, who opposed foreign entanglements and distrusted war profiteers (after all, they'd paid the price for militarism in the previous war against Germany).

In 1938, Chamberlain signed an accord with Hitler labeled the Munich Agreement, which let the Führer annex part of Czechoslovakia if he agreed to stop seizing more territory. Most Britons praised Chamberlain's coup; but of course it didn't stop Hitler, who provoked war with England a year later, when he invaded Poland. The pacifist Chamberlain proved within eight months an inept wartime leader, opening the door for Churchill's appointment by the king as his successor (the first scene of Darkest Hour).

Chamberlain's most fiery critic, Churchill had spent years protesting appeasement, using his favorite soapbox: the newspaper op-ed. When Chamberlain―in keeping with the Munich Agreement―moved to stifle all opposition to Hitler, he ruled out critical speeches in Parliament and threatened the newspapers with shutdown, citing national secrecy laws. Churchill, in response, promised to take his message to the streets.

In a November 1938 speech before the national press club, Churchill wondered aloud whether Chamberlain wouldn't rather live in a totalitarian state. "In those states they conduct foreign policy on the basis that the press say nothing but what it is told, and immediately say what it is told. It might be very convenient, no doubt, if we could suppress public opinion here, and everything was allowed to go on quietly without our knowing what was going on outside."

Churchill suggested England was in fact already experiencing a press blackout. With appeasement's critics in Parliament muzzled and the press censored, Chamberlain enjoyed carte blanch to bamboozle Britons. 

The situation left opponents like Churchill one choice: to resist the government's policy through the "public platform." And resist Churchill did. 

Between September 1938―when the Munich Agreement was signed―and September 1939―when Germany invaded Poland―Churchill spoke against appeasement relentlessly on the radio. He also repackaged 80 of his op-eds into a book―which became an immediate best-seller―and, with financial help from silent backers, erected billboards calling for his appointment to Chamberlain's cabinet. 

Churchill's cabinet appointment did come, three days after Hitler entered Poland and simultaneously with England's declaration of war with Germany.

Welcome to Perfection

There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness.

― Shannon L. Alder

B2B marketers who rent prospect names have a funny idea about accuracy.

They expect perfection.

A team of direct marketing experts sampled the offerings of five large suppliers of prospect names and verified the samples' accuracy by phoning the prospects.

They found the data offered imperfect. Suppliers' data-accuracy ranged from a low of 93% to a high of 98%, as the chart below shows:

Why anyone who routinely accepts less-than-perfection from a spouse, a quarterback, a physician or a priest expects perfection from a data supplier is beyond me.

If you do, my advice is twofold: get real; and get a list broker. Brokers know which suppliers offer decently accurate prospect data―and which don't.

And don't expect perfection.

Spreading the Light

There are two ways of spreading light:
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

— Edith Wharton

In the early 1920s, Professor Edith Stein was assistant-teaching at the University of Freiburg alongside her mentor, the renowned philosopher Edmund Husserl.

Their aim was considered subversive at the time: to train a generation of scholars to dissect "lived" human experiences—everything from falling in love to walking the dog, encountering a Rembrandt to eating a sandwich. Professional philosophers rarely thought about such things. 

Stein's own interest lay in dissecting empathy—our lived experience of others—which to her mind was the key to self-knowledge. Her interest stemmed, in part, from her work as a nurse in a field hospital during World War I, after which she told a friend, "I realize now that my life is no longer my own.”

A once-devout Jew turned atheist, Stein believed through philosophy she could shed light on the existence of souls—an effort her mentor encouraged ("The life of men is nothing else than a way towards God," Husserl later told her). But while visiting a friend's home, Stein read a borrowed copy of the autobiography of a nun, Saint Teresa of Ávila. It convinced her to convert to Catholicism. Stein then quit her university job and began to lecture throughout Germany, not on Catholicism, but feminism—talks that made her famous. Twelve years later, Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Cologne, planning to live a secluded life writing philosophy books.

But politics intervened. Hitler's persecution of Jews prompted the nuns to transfer Stein in 1938 to a convent in Holland, where they thought she'd be safe. And she was until 1942, when Holland's bishops condemned Nazi anti-Semitism from the pulpit and Hitler, in retaliation, ordered the arrest all Jewish converts in the country. Stein was taken in a boxcar to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber. Her body was cremated, like 1,018,350 others.

In 1987, Pope John Paul II—another of Husserl's followers—beatified Edith Stein. That same year, a two-year-old girl in Boston mistook Tylenol for candy and swallowed the equivalent of 16 lethal doses. The girl's parents begged everyone they knew to pray to Stein to intercede on their dying daughter's behalf. They did, and the girl recovered within days.

''I'm not saying it was a miracle,'' her doctor told The New York Times. ''I'm saying it was miraculous. I'm Jewish. I don't believe per se in miracles, but I can say I didn't expect her to recover.''

Two years later, the pope canonized Edith Stein as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. He remarked in English that day, ""Edith Stein stands out as a beacon which casts its light amid the terrible darkness which has marred this century. To her prayers before God I entrust all who suffer for the sake of justice and human dignity."

The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled

Democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

— Isaac Asimov

I've had it with the truthies, trash and trivia that's vying for my overtaxed attention.

Once intriguing, the big news sites and social media networks have become cyber cesspools.

My New Year's resolution: to boycott them.

The last straw was a click-bait headline that dogged me yesterday: "The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled."

I don't need—or care—to know why ABC executives scrapped a TV sit-com 46 years ago.

Worse, I resent being told the "real" reason was adultery, when in fact it was low audience share.

It's time for all good people to call a halt to America's romance with anti-intellectualism—the willful "dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility," as executive coach Ray Williams puts it.

We should take no pride in the fact Americans choose to be gullible and uninformed.

We should only take comfort in the fact that millions of the most gullible and uninformed are killing themselves with drugs, alcohol and guns.

Butcher's Bible

Democratic theories of government in their modern form
are based on dogmas of equality.

— Madison Grant

Madison Grant was a New York City lawyer who in 1916 published The Passing of the Great Race.

Grant's work flew off booksellers' shelves after Science and The Saturday Evening Post both praised it, and climbed steadily to become an international best-seller.

The Passing of the Great Race attributed every benefit of civilization to the efforts of the Nordic race, and every threat to those benefits to people of other races. 

Based on its claim of Nordic superiority, the book argued for the end of immigration and equal rights and the start of a national eugenics program designed to foster "obliteration of the unfit."

However, thanks to the protests of anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead—who produced compelling counter-evidence that showed race had no bearing on culture—the arguments made by The Passing of the Great Race soon fell from favor, and Madison Grant lost his following.

But not completely.

One day in 1934, Grant received a letter from a prominent German, who thanked him for writing "my bible." 

The letter was signed by Adolf Hitler.