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God’s Little Smuggler
“Brother Andrew” is the pseudonym of Andrew van der Bijl, a Christian missionary who smuggled Bibles into communist countries during the height of the Cold War. His story was well known in Evangelical circles; they even made a comic book about him. He told of crossing through border checkpoints, his ancient Volkswagen stuffed with Bibles. It was like a spy thriller. He was never caught. The blindness of the crossing guards seemed miraculous.
Brother Andrew was the perfect hero for a young, deeply conservative, deeply religious boy — which is to say, my 13-year-old self. I longed to be like him. To face danger, to engage in intrigue, to take the battle to an implacable, prodigious foe — that would be glory.
Out of the blue, my shot at glory appeared.
It came through an advertisement in a magazine. I don’t remember the organization’s name. Their modus operandi was a bit convoluted, but I instantly grasped what they were doing. I instantly knew I wanted in on the action!
They had built a mailing list of contacts in Eastern Europe, through illegal broadcasts or something. They used ordinary mail to send Bibles to those people. To avoid notice of the censors, the Bibles needed to be mailed in small sections, 20 pages at a time. To confuse the sensors, the sections must be sent sporadically in hand-addressed envelopes with return addresses from random locations.
For that, they needed an army of volunteers. That’s where I came in! I responded to the ad, offering to help. I was sent perhaps 50 copies of one section of St. Matthew’s Gospel (if my memory and guesswork were correct; it was in Hungarian). My instructions told me how to address and post the envelopes. I was to mail them two to three times per week, no more.
It was a lot of responsibility for a kid, considering the work was strung out over many months. I lost interest midway and almost dropped out. I don’t remember my parents showing any interest in what I was doing, which seems a little odd, me mailing letters with alphabet soup addresses every few days.
I finished the job. I think what made me finish was the sense that, for the first time in my life, I was doing something with real consequences. The danger to my life was zero, and yet, through these Bible sections, printed on their ultra-thin, odd-smelling paper, wrapped in a mass-printed “hand-written” notes intended to fool the censors (they were obviously printed; how dumb were these censors anyway?) — through this ultra-remote act of smuggling contraband behind enemy lines, I was connecting with people whose lives were very much in danger.
I don’t recall talking about this business with anyone. It was my little secret. But I do remember the feeling I got when I put that last envelope in the mail: I am Brother Andrew.
Introducing the Snow Driving Incompetence Belt (SDIB)
A snowstorm is currently threatening America’s capital, which has brought out all the jokes about that city’s lousy drivers. This makes me wonder if there is a narrow zone — a belt, if you will — across the middle of the country where one encounters the most incompetence during snowfall. South of this belt, snow is so rare that it generally keeps people off the roads entirely when it happens; above the line, drivers are — what’s the opposite of incompetent? — competent.
I’d like to ask Ricochet members to nominate their home cities for membership in the Snow Driving Incompetence Belt (SDIB). Here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, we’re very safely in the Competent Zone. Places like Dallas and Tampa are solidly in the No Snow Zone.
I’m guessing the SDIB starts in Maryland, passes through Tennessee (or does mountain weather interrupt the belt?), continues on to Oklahoma, and then veers north to Oregon.
Anyone have a better idea of where to draw the line?
Driverless Cars and Sobriety
I’d like to make a prediction: driverless cars — which are back in the news — will undermine our culture’s strong censure of drunkenness. I think we will revert to the kind of relaxed view toward mild inebriation that was the case in, for example, pre-automobile England.
Giving ordinary people the power to control high-speed vehicles initiated a unique era where anyone might wreak unintended violence upon innocents through a mere moment’s inattention. The driverless car era will bring that to and end and, consequentially, the stigma against being tipsy will fade. I predict people will look back on this era with pity and horror (probably over drinks).
I’m not saying this will be a good thing; I’m just making a prediction. Certain drinking habits, now hidden, will come to light and we’ll learn about the true extent of alcohol consumption and high-functioning alcoholism.
How else might driverless cars change the culture?
Honor Books
Allen, MI, is the kind of town for which the expression “wide place in the road” was coined. Its “downtown” retail strip is just two shuttered brick buildings with tall Italianate windows that stare vacantly at the barely-slowing traffic of US 12.
Between the buildings is a gap filled by a remarkable oddity: Honor Books. As you can see, it’s a lean-to of discarded two-by-fours, plywood sheets, and barn skylights. There is no door, only a yawning gap. The sign up top has not aged gracefully but still entreats, “Serve Yourself.” The sign out on the sidewalk cheerfully declares, “Yes, We’re Open” as if the not-to-code construction left any doubt. (I have driven by at all hours of day and night and never seen that sign withdrawn.)
Inside, the “customer” finds a few mismatched bookcases displaying perhaps as many as a couple hundred books. There is some evidence the books have been sorted by topic. The uncontrolled environment has allowed mildew to play havoc.
Most remarkable is the payment system that puts the “honor” in Honor Books. A slot has been cut in the back wall and an arrow … well, see for yourself:
My first visit, I chose a couple of sci-fi novels, a Bradbury and a Heinlein, and slid 70 cents into the slot. I was more than a little disappointed that I felt no cold, deathly fingers reaching out from within to touch mine.
For I cannot deny it, the place is creepy. It doesn’t explicitly offer free hugs but the place has that vibe.
I believe in Honor Books, however. On my second stop I made a donation, a boxed set of Anne McCaffrey’s dragon novels. I fear Honor Books may be founded upon a fierce commitment to capitalism that my donation violated, but I couldn’t help myself.
I can’t get over the very existence of Honor Books. Despite living in a seedy rural hamlet, surrounded by vanishingly few book lovers (presumably) and with manifestly minimal resources — some poor soul took the trouble and marshaled the courage to build a lonely outpost to Literature. I believe in Honor Books and I love Honor Books, and the next time you drive through Allen, MI I demand you stop, pick out a book, and slide your 35 cents into the slot.
Will Another Alito Ever Be Confirmed?
After the Supreme Court’s latest term, a line has been drawn in the sand so clearly that even a RINO can see it without glasses.
The Obergefell decision is fairly fragile. Justice Kennedy might resign during the next president’s term, and a Republican president might appoint his replacement. But if the current balance of the court is in danger of being pushed rightward*, the Democrats will do anything to stop it. They will use the filibuster and leave the seat unoccupied, for years if necessary.
In this scenario, our best hope is that the GOP holds firm and refuses to accept another moderate like Kennedy. As long as Republicans has a majority in the Senate, they should use all available countermeasures against the filibuster, blocking bills and even holding payment of federal employees as ransom.
We need to make leftist judges at all levels toxic. Remember: we don’t need the courts the way the left does. A denuded or discredited court for us would be unfortunate, but for the left it would be an apocalypse.
Alito was the last reliably conservative justice confirmed. I am pessimistic we will ever see his like again. The GOP establishment finds a liberal court very convenient and may join with the left to stab us in the back.
* Interestingly, Ginsburg shows no interest in resigning during Obama’s presidency and she is 82. Fellow member James of England told me an interesting theory: he believes Ginsburg has a legal mind vastly superior to either Kagan’s or Sotomayor’s, and could not bear to see her seat taken by another of Obama’s hacks. Perhaps she’s counting on Hillary winning in 2016.
Should Jindal Be Kicking Himself Over 2012?
Those who follow my posting obsessively (i.e., weirdos) know that Gov. Bobby Jindal has been my favorite presidential hopeful since 2009. Sadly, my ardor is waning. The complete lack of people who agree with me makes inclined to give up and move on.
That’s too bad. Bobby Jindal has a great story to tell and is a strong conservative with wide experience. His problem is timing: in 2016 he’s running against the strongest GOP field ever. What if he had pulled an Obama and run in 2012 when he was “too young”? Would it have worked?
I suspect he would have won the nomination. Remember how desperate we were to find an alternative to Romney? I voted for Santorum in the Michigan primary — a man I didn’t particularly like — just to protest the Romney juggernaut. The polls gave each challenger a bump in turn; heck, we even gave Herman Cain a look. Herman Cain! Bobby Jindal would have swept those jokers aside, swept up the anti-Romney vote, and brought in extra voters on his own. It would have been a cakewalk.
Beating President Obama wouldn’t have been so easy, but I think Jindal could have done better than Romney. Still, Obama’s historic presidency and Jindal’s pencil-necked geekiness — which the progress of years is ameliorating, but would have been an intense negative in 2012 — would probably have combined to deny Jindal the win, just barely. I think.
But even in that event, we’d hardly be worse off than we are now, and Jindal would be among the top picks for 2016.
A Trend or a Cycle?
Whenever I hear of the death of Christianity in Europe, I think “this ain’t the first time.” I base my reaction on Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, which belongs in that category of histories I am afraid to believe because they so perfectly confirm my prejudices.
If Cahill accurately depicts what happened at the onset of the Dark Ages — i.e., Christianity died on the Continent, but revived through the hard work of Irish missionaries — it offers encouragement to one side of the most interesting debate in sociology today: is the present decline of Christianity in Europe part of a trend or a cycle?
Call them the trendists vs. the cyclists. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry offers support to the cyclists by suggesting a revival of Catholicism has begun in France. His evidence is anecdotal, as is this report of an American-style mega-church in the former East Germany, but it gets me wondering.
The trendist view is so taken for granted in elite circles that it’s more accurate to say it’s assumed rather than asserted. Religious belief is seen as a heuristic born of ignorance; it may have had utility in primitive societies, but it naturally withers under the blazing light of modern science.
Trendist thinking might also help explain elite indulgence of Islamist extremism. Sure, a few Muslims currently want jihad, but soon — so the thinking goes — their children will be good, harmless theological liberals and their grandchildren will be atheists.
A religious revival among Europeans would shake the faith of the trendists to the core. What if religion really were a fundamental fact of the human psyche? That would mean the vexations of Christianity, Judaism and… and… miscellaneous might be with us forever.
But maybe, just maybe, the trendists are right (ironically, in the long run, Christian eschatology agrees.) We’ll have to watch and wait.
The Constitutional Flaw That Doomed Our Federal System
Instead of watching helplessly as our republic devolves into crown government, let’s distract ourselves with a counterfactual. What if senators were appointed by state legislatures for indefinite terms?
The Senate was designed to preserve the federal nature of our system. Members of the House represent the people, but the Senators were to represent the states — really, state governments.
Had this worked, the people would have benefited. (Sometimes, you win by grabbing all the power, but sometimes you win by ceding power to critical allies. The states were the people’s only allies in the War Against the Feds.) Unfortunately, senators came to be viewed as redundant representatives of the people, and this was reinforced by the 17th Amendment’s requiring the direct election of senators.
The design flaw that doomed the whole experiment was simple: fixed six-year terms for senators. They resemble other elected officials. The senate lacks a proper feedback loop. Senators become creatures of Washington. They go native.
We should treat them as state ambassadors. They should serve at the pleasure of the state legislators. If one gets out of line, recall him. Replace him instantly.
Sadly, the founders lacked the benefit of this wisdom. We’re doomed.
A Hard Message for Rape Victims
Yesterday, The College Fix sent out a powerful tweet regarding regarding rape accusations. As I’ve never dealt with the aftermath of rape myself, I cannot say I’d have the courage to follow its advice if someone I loved – or, heck, if I myself – had been raped. But I agree with them and this needs saying:
The "compassion" behind telling rape victims to stay away from police is enabling serial rapists & shielding admins. http://t.co/Oz4lnmSHvJ
— The College Fix (@CollegeFix) December 2, 2014
Put another way, the silence of rape victims is the number one enabler of serial rape. Not insensitive officials; not a “culture”; not the “patriarchy.”
Even in he-said-she-said cases likely to result in acquittal, a public rape accusation can make a big difference. It brands the attacker for life and gives any future victims extra ammunition. Victims of unambiguous — though, perhaps, hard-to-prove — rape must take their accusations to the police, no matter the pain or humiliation.
Though conservatives are supposedly indifferent to rape victims, the truth is that we take deep, grim satisfaction when the evidence takes one of these predators down. The difference is our commitment to due process. Our world view is not shaken by human depravity.
As best we know, the University of Virginia case has been hampered by the extreme reticence of the accuser. She should have gone to the police right away and she should make her accusation public now. As it is, the accused goes on in his anonymity while a fraternity and university have their reputations ruined.
It’s not as if the accused cannot be found (and it’s an admission of incompetence that the reporter says she can’t find him herself). We know he was a junior at the time of the alleged attack, and that he was a lifeguard. How many members of the fraternity fit that description? I can’t imagine it’s more than a few. Either the accusation is a complete fabrication, or a number of people know who the accuser is. I expect — sooner or later — that we will know a lot more about this case, and that is all to the good.
To me, the most incomprehensible people in this case are the friends who pressured the victim to keep quiet. Do people like that – social climbers with no empathy toward their “friend” – really exist? That detail, more than any other, makes me wonder about this story. Is it really true the reporter did not interview them? If they do exist, they’re little better than the rapists, in my view.
I’m honestly open to the idea that it’s simply too much to expect so much bravery from a victim shattered by rape, though we send men into battle and demand they face death, and have for all of human history. If so, however, we can expect rapists to continue their evil unabated; there’s no other way around it.
The one thing we can do as a society is reduce the stigma of the victim and offer encouragement. But if more women don’t come forward and report their attackers, feminist slogans of regarding the patriarchy and “rape culture” won’t do anyone any good; we’d be better if they left law-abiding citizens in peace.
Der Grübermensch
One result of the progressive government ushered in by Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 is that the power of the government has been placed in the hands of people like Jonathan Gruber. Gruber is annoying, to be sure, with his pet parrots and the prissy intonation his voice finds right at the moment he’s going to say something especially arrogant, but, let’s face it, those are not the issues. We forgive odd personalities when they are harmless, and well we should.
The real point is that Gruber gestated in that special polis-within-a-polis that is the technocratic academy-bureaucracy-media nexus. (I love using that word ‘nexus,” by the way. It’s so recreationally paranoid.) His father was a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business. Raised in the NYC suburb of Ridgewood, New Jersey, he earned degrees at MIT and Harvard, and began his career teaching at MIT.
This is reverse provincialism: there’s no evidence Gruber has ever mixed socially or professionally with the very voters he so glibly dismissed as “stupid.” Although, let’s be fair: the only voters “stupid” enough to fit Gruber’s description are those who believed the lies and voted for Barack Obama.
All elites suffer from self-blindness, but at some point the system breaks down and they lose their self-confidence. Then the end comes, either gracefully, as with the old WASP elite in 1960s America, or cataclysmically, as with almost every other case. Sadly, I suspect this bunch of knuckleheads have a few more decades in them.
And That’s Where It All Went Wrong
World History has plenty of moments where a single decision — or a seemingly insignificant act — brought about enduring disaster that appears, in retrospect, to have been be tragically avoidable. The events of late summer of 1914 come to mind.
More obscurely, Winston Churchill famously regretted the monkey who bit King Alexander of Greece on the leg, which caused a fatal infection and set off a succession crisis in during the Greco-Turkish War, arguably leading to the deaths of a quarter million people.
I wonder if the history of the United States is unusually immune to such tipping points. Certainly, the central disaster of our history, the Civil War, happened due to an almost mathematical inevitability. On the other hand, you can point to the Great Depression or the War of 1812 as being all too unnecessary.
If you had a time machine and could undo just one act in history, what would it be? Let’s avoid the obvious; please limit yourself to U.S. history, or to the more obscure events of world history since 1492.
Image Credit: Shutterstock user Voronin76
The Summer of Love in the Winter of Its Discontent
Last month, Ohio State University fired its popular marching band director, Jon Waters. Waters had allegedly tolerated a sexualized culture within the band, which led to charges of sexual assault and harassment. I’m not interested in litigating this dispute (but y’all do so in the comments if you like). Instead, I’d like to look at the funny, strange, and sad thing it reveals about modern college administration.
Starting in 1969, courts began dismantling the principle of in loco parentis, putting more emphasis on students’ freedoms. Because government is entangled in education, this may have made some sense. But maybe they went too far. Today, the concept is outré and mostly goes unimplemented by schools.
Or does it? Rob Long is fond of pointing out that modern manners aren’t laxer than their predecessors, merely different. We’ve mostly thrown off taboos about sex and profanity in public, and replaced them with taboos about race and gender. Speech codes and campus show trials are simply an extension of this. The Ohio State band controversy, involving incidents not occurring during official band events, shows just how much schools will meddle in students’ private lives — and demand that teachers to the same — to achieve certain ends.
The rejection of in loco parentis failed. It failed because of the hypocrisy of the radicals. They lied to us; maybe lied to themselves. They were never going to treat college students as adults. They don’t see the young as reliable fonts of societal wisdom. Never trust anyone under 23.
The current campus morality enforcement regime is simply in loco parentis replaced by a newer, stupider moral code. I find that pretty hilarious, but also kind of sad.
Image Credit: Flickr user Brian Josefowicz.
Trafficking in a Bad Idea
Adam Mann at Wired.com reveals a startling truth: if you build roads, people will drive on them!
In 2009, two economists—Matthew Turner of the University of Toronto and Gilles Duranton of the University of Pennsylvania—decided to compare the amount of new roads and highways built in different U.S. cities between 1980 and 2000, and the total number of miles driven in those cities over the same period.
“We found that there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship,” said Turner.
If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent. It’s like the two figures were moving in perfect lockstep, changing at the same exact rate.
Mann goes on to explain that building more roads to reduce traffic is “fruitless” because drivers will take advantage of the greater capacity to travel more frequently. And that really is the sum of his point.
Now, I don’t want to respond to narrow-mindedness with more of the same. I understand Mann’s point of view. It’s true that traffic congestion is vexing, and it’s reasonable to want it to go away. Most big highways I’ve seen (with the notable exception of some in Arizona festooned with gorgeous rock mosaics) are ugly and dehumanizing. Human behavior turns ugly from behind a steering wheel. And traffic makes pollution.
Thus I concede the reasonable origins of the anti-trafficist point of view. What is so drearily irritating in this case is that Adam Mann does not return the favor.
Mann will not address the obvious conclusion: bigger highways allow for more driving, which allows for more human freedom.
Well, wait; he almost addresses it:
The answer has to do with what roads allow people to do: move around. As it turns out, we humans love moving around. And if you expand people’s ability to travel, they will do it more, living farther away from where they work and therefore being forced to drive into town. Making driving easier also means that people take more trips in the car than they otherwise would.
The problem in Mann’s mind is that all this moving around is bad. Implicitly, humans acting upon their own individual choice is destructive. The tragedy of the commons is always tragic, because everything is a commons. Or something.
Mann is a big fan of “congestion pricing.” This is a top-down system for imposing extra costson using roads in high-demand times and places. The problem is that real-world implementations of such schemes are much less successful than Mann glibly asserts. The real experience, as shown in London and a few other pioneering cities, has fallen well short of the ideal.
I’m not opposed to congestion pricing in principle. I think it might be least disruptivel as applied to parking and subway use, where one simply tinkers with existing payment systems. But, researchers note the problem is far more complex than the simplistic “solutions” so far proposed. As Robert Cervero summarizes:
True social-cost pricing of metropolitan travel has proven to be a theoretical ideal that so far has eluded real-world implementation. The primary obstacle is that except for professors of transportation economics and a cadre of vocal environmentalists, few people are in favor of considerably higher charges for peak-period travel. Middle-class motorists often complain they already pay too much in gasoline taxes and registration fees to drive their cars, and that to pay more during congested periods would add insult to injury. In the United States, few politicians are willing to champion the cause of congestion pricing for fear of reprisal from their constituents. Critics also argue that charging more to drive is elitist policy, pricing the poor off of roads so that the wealthy can move about unencumbered. It is for all these reasons that peak-period pricing remains a pipe dream in the minds of many.
It reminds me of the complaints after airline deregulation: airports are overrun with commoners!
On the other hand, a natural, market-based system of congestion pricing exists. We call it “congestion”! Ordinary people, in the privacy of their sovereign minds, have concluded, contrary to the will of people like Mann, that they’d rather pay for travel in peak hours and locations via wasted time instead of tolls. You can argue that they’re wrong. You can even strike a condescending pose toward such vulgar opinion. Just don’t assume such ideas are founded on an ignorance that will shatter when confronted by a brilliant refutation at Wired.
Indeed, people make reasonable calculations about congestion all the time. I live in Ann Arbor. I’ve learned not to travel anywhere near Michigan Stadium on football Saturdays. I don’t need some knucklehead mayor with some elaborate, annoying system of toll booths or license plate-reading spy cameras to help me figure that out.
Choosing Books for a Young Conservative
This is my son’s last free summer. Next year, he’ll be 16, when driving and working will distend the umbilicus connecting him to home. So, acting on a long-held, half-baked impulse, I’m going to spend this summer discussing books with him.
Since he never reads on his own the books I hand him, I’m reading the assignments right along with him. Here’s my (insanely) ambitious list:
- From Bauhaus to Our House (Tom Wolfe) completed
- The Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis) current
- The Conservative Mind (Russell Kirk)
- Architecture: Form, Space and Order (Francis D. K. Ching)
- Poems: Wadsworth Handbook & Anthology (Main & Seng)
- Anatomy of Thatcherism (Shirley Robin Letwin)
- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- From Dawn to Decadence (Jacques Barzun)
- Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)
- City Comforts (David Sucher)
- How the Irish Saved Civilization (Thomas Cahill)
- The Timeless Way of Building (Christopher Alexander)
- Introduction (W. H. Auden) to The Protestant Mystics (A. Fremantle)
- The Painted Word (Tom Wolfe)
- The Weight of Glory (C.S. Lewis)
- The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis)
- Leadership & Self-Deception (The Arbinger Institute)
I don’t expect to read every word of every book. Certainly, in the case of Kirk, Letwin, and Barzun (at least), I’ll select a few representative chapters.
What do you think of my list? What book by Roger Scruton should I add? Should we skip the Kirk and take our Burke straight-up? How about some Klingon poetry?
Wendy Davis Is the Sarah Palin of the Democratic Party—Fredosphere
I offer the title of this post as a resolution for a debate. I’m not asserting, or even denying, the two women are equivalent. I just want to see the resulting discussion.
Has Anyone Told You Just How Evil Kickstarter Is? — Fredosphere
Barry Ritholtz of Bloomberg View wants you to know Kickstarter is evil—at least when corporations get into the act. Oculus, the virtual reality company recently bought by Facebook for a couple billion, received an infusion of $2.4 million early in its history thanks to a Kickstarter campaign. This kind of corporate funding became legal thanks to the JOBS Act of 2012.
Ritholtz does not like the JOBS Act:
Regardless of strenuous objections, the JOBS Act became law, making it all-too-easy for companies to raise money. It was more of the same radical deregulation that helped cause the financial crisis. This was not about making markets work more smoothly, but rather, an extreme form of “smash & grab” capitalism.
Let’s ignore the evidence that deregulation did not cause the financial crisis. Let’s ignore the lurid phrasing of “smash & grab”. Let’s cut to Ritholtz’s thesis:
[I]t’s not a fraud, it’s a scam. You see, fraud involves something where there is a violation of the law; no rules appear to have been broken here. This is how the JOBS Act is supposed to work: Let people make dumb decisions on their own, without any protection.
[…] These funders, who backed the company three months after the JOBS Act passed, did not. As the Journal noted, they were promised “a sincere thank you from the Oculus team.” And, for $25, a T-shirt. For $300, the dangle of “an early developer kit” including a prototype headset.
Okay, so here Ritholtz admits the fundamental fact: the Kickstarter funders got exactly what they were promised. For whatever reasons—dumb decisions, yes; or, just maybe, the thrill of advancing technology or simple altruism or maybe even flat boredom—the funders gave money expecting essentially nothing in return.
Yes, eventually, the company cashed in big. So what? It’s possible, quite likely in fact, that a good number of Oculus’ funders have no regrets. (That would be my reaction.)
So why is Ritholtz so sputteringly vexed over this outcome? Is this the green-eyed monster rearing its head again? Does every left-wing impulse spring from envy?
Not just envy, apparently, but also contempt:
My regulatory philosophy is simple: You humans need protection from yourselves, especially when money is involved (and the SEC agrees). Sure, you can operate heavy machinery and do complex verb conjugations, but when it comes to understanding anything involving capital, you are often no better than a 2-year-old. And that is before the red fog of greed begins to cloud your minds.
Good thing the green fog of envy cannot cloud Ritholtz’s mind. I do wonder, though, how these infantile investors will ever grow up if the wise nannies of the world forever save them from themselves.