After we finish one of these banned classics, someone inevitably asks, “Why was this banned in the first place?”

Years ago, when I first began teaching, books might be banned because they showed characters having sex, swearing, committing suicide, or advocating for communism. Today, those things barely cause a ripple and, instead, books are most often canceled for reasons related to ‘presentism‘—judging the past by the standards of the present.

It’s funny how literature written hundreds or thousands of years ago tends to represent the ideas, views, values, and social structures prevalent at the time.

For instance, Homer lived around the 8th or 9th century BCE, but the “Iliad” immortalized people from the earlier Bronze Age. Whether or not the events of the Trojan War actually happened, the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean was a violent time. Is it shocking that Homer’s Bronze Age characters see violence as a practical way to solve problems? Why are we surprised that Agamemnon and his troops engaged in pillaging and plundering? It’s not like the Argive army had signed on to the Geneva Convention.

When Shakespeare wrote the “Merchant of Venice” in the late 1500s, anti-Semitism was commonplace across Europe. Venetian Jews were forced into segregated neighborhoods from 1516–1797. If Shakespeare set his play in Venice, doesn’t it stand to reason anti-Semitism might be an issue for one of his characters, who just happens to be a Jewish moneylender residing in the city?

Characters who come to life through historic works of literature show the world as it was—not as we’d like it to be. 

In Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (another oft-banned book), Atticus Finch tells Scout, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” 

Historians and archaeologists may give us hints about what life was like during the Bronze Age or Renaissance Venice, but outside the realm of speculative fiction it is not possible to visit the past in a time machine as H.G. Wells imagined. 

But we can dive into books, plays, and poems that have stood the test of time, and help us understand what life was like.

There’s no way to know what it would have felt like to be part of a Bronze Age army laying siege to another city unless we turn a page of the “Iliad” and climb inside Achilles’ skin for a moment. 

There’s no way to pop into a Renaissance Venetian market for the afternoon, so instead we read “The Merchant of Venice” and crawl inside Shylock’s head. By doing so, we begin to see the world from Shylock’s point of view; to understand why he asked for a pound of flesh.

Today’s trend of banning or ‘canceling’ authors and their books simply because those books don’t represent modern day values condemns us to know even less about the past than we already do. 

Classic literature gives us the opportunity to gain an understanding of the constants of the human condition. Readers of the “Iliad” come to understand there were wars during the Bronze Age, just as there are wars today that cause immeasurable suffering. Readers of “The Merchant of Venice” learn that anti-Semitism was a problem in Europe long before Hitler’s Germany. 

When we read great books written long ago, we heed Atticus Finch’s advice and it makes a difference. I’ve seen firsthand how reading classics increases my students’ level of empathy. They gain an understanding of the unchanging nature of the human condition. My students also come to see how much progress we as human beings have made because, having read about a Bronze Age battlefield or a segregated Venetian neighborhood, they understand where we started.

We should embrace history—not cancel it—so that we are not doomed to repeat it.

Gina Prosch educates her children at home in Mid-Missouri. She is also a homeschool life coach (and parent) who blogs and shares homeschool resources at www.TheHomeschoolWay.com. She is also the co-host of The OnlySchoolers Podcast. 

The post Canceling Lessons Learned from Classic Literature appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Others, like me, want to know more before we judge. What is prompting someone to engage in it? Who will be affected and how? What does the “disobedient” person hope to accomplish? Are there alternative actions that might be more effective?

One of my earliest memories from childhood was an act of civil disobedience. My family resided near Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, about 11 miles from the Ohio border town of Negley. At the time, Pennsylvania prohibited the unauthorized introduction and sale of milk from Ohio. On many a Saturday in the late 1950s and early 1960s, my father and I would drive over to Negley and fill the back seat of our car with good, cheap milk. During the drive back home, he would caution me to “keep it covered and don’t say anything if the cops pull us over.”

For me, milk smuggling was a thrill ride. It was downright exciting to evade a stupid law while keeping an eye out for a cop who might have nothing better to do than bust a couple of notorious dairy dealers. I know my dad made a few bucks when he re-sold the milk to happy neighbors. We never had any regrets or pangs of conscience for committing this victimless crime. We were simply supporting a cause that even Abraham Lincoln may have endorsed when he said, “The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.”

Government officials hate civil disobedience because it’s a disgruntled citizen’s way of thumbing his nose. If we’re unhappy with laws or policies that are stupid, destructive, corrupt, counterproductive, unconstitutional, or in other ways indefensible, they advise us to do the “democratic” thing—which means hope for the best in a future election, stand in line to be condescended to at some boring public hearing, or just shut up.

My go-to expert on the issue is not a politician or a preacher or an academic. It’s Henry David Thoreau, who famously asked, “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

If the choice is obedience or conscience, I try my best to pick conscience.

Historically, civil disobedience—the refusal to comply with a law or command of a political authority—is exceedingly common. Sometimes it is quiet and largely unnoticeable. Other times it is boisterous and public. For an act to be one of civil disobedience, it must be accompanied by principled or philosophical objections to a law or command (to exclude such acts as simple theft, fraud, and the like).

Some political theorists argue that to qualify as civil disobedience, an act must be peaceful; others allow for violence in their definition of the term. Revolutions are certainly acts of disobedience, though because they tend to be accompanied by violence they often aren’t very “civil.” In any event, the indefensible violence this week in Washington should not blind us to the very honorable history of genuine civil disobedience and its loftier motivations.

Here’s a short list of what I call “great moments in civil disobedience.” There’s no particular order other than chronological, and I wouldn’t even claim these are all among the “top” examples in history. They are, at the least, interesting food for thought. See how many of them you could endorse.

1. Defying a Pharaoh in Ancient Egypt

Chapter One of the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus provides what is probably the oldest recorded instance of civil disobedience. It dates to about 3,500 years ago. Two midwives in Egypt, named Shiphrah and Puah, disobeyed an order from the Pharaoh to kill all male Hebrew babies at birth. When they were called to account, they lied to cover their tracks. The Exodus account says their defiance pleased God, who rewarded them for it. So, anyone who says God is always on the side of the politicians must wrestle with that example, as well as the next one.

2. Sophocles’s Portrayal of Antigone

The playwright Sophocles wrote numerous literary tragedies, one of which (though fictional) tells the tale of Antigone. Creon, the King of Thebes, attempts to prevent her from giving her brother Polynices a proper burial. Antigone declared her conscience to be more important than any royal decree. She was sentenced to death for her defiance but never recanted.

3. Judea and the Slaughter of Innocents

The Book of Matthew in the New Testament reveals that when told that a Jewish Messiah had been born in Bethlehem, King Herod felt personally threatened. He ordered the Magi (the three visiting wise men) to go to the city, find the baby, and then report back to him. As we all know, the Magi did indeed go to Bethlehem where they presented Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus with gifts, but then they disobeyed Herod and vanished. In a fit of anger, the King then ordered the execution of all male children under two years old in the vicinity of Bethlehem. If Joseph and Mary and others who assisted them had not refused to comply, the story of Christianity would be quite different.

4. Robert the Bruce Defies a Pope

In 1317, the Pope demanded that King Robert I of Scotland (better known as Robert the Bruce) embrace a truce with the English in the First War of Scottish Independence. For his refusal to follow the Pope’s orders, Robert was excommunicated. Scottish nobles took their King’s defiance to the next level in 1320 in a letter known as the Declaration of Arbroath. It was the first time in history that an organized group of people asserted it was the duty of a King to rule by the consent of the governed and the duty of the governed to get rid of him if he didn’t. “It is not for honors or glory or wealth that we fight,” they declared, “but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.” See Seven Centuries Since William Wallace.

5. Flushing’s Stand for Quakers

Governor Peter Stuyvesant of the Dutch colonies in North America did not like Quakers. In 1656, he commenced persecution of them and demanded local authorities participate. The following year, the citizens of Flushing (present-day Queens, New York City) drafted and signed a document known as the Flushing Remonstrance. As I recently wrote, those brave people essentially told Stuyvesant, “You are commanding us to persecute Quakers. We will not. So take your intolerance and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.” The Governor shut down the town council of Flushing and arrested some of the document’s signers but was eventually ordered by the Dutch West India Company to rescind his policy of persecution.

6. Boston’s Smashing Tea Party

Nobody does tea parties like disgruntled colonists from Beantown. In 1773, the British parliament conferred upon the British East India Company a commercial monopoly on the tea trade. That and “taxation with representation” provoked the Sons of Liberty to stage the famous Boston Tea Party, an event organized by Samuel Adams and other American patriots. Under the cover of night, colonials boarded a British ship and tossed its cargo of tea into Boston’s harbor. Three years later, civil disobedience evolved into a Declaration of Independence and open warfare between Britain and its American colonies.

7. Robert Smalls’s Daring Escape

Robert Smalls was born a slave in South Carolina in 1839. Twenty-three years later, in a daring escape, he and other slave friends commandeered a Confederate transport ship in Charleston harbor. They sailed it right past Confederate guns and into the embrace of the Union blockade. I share this example as emblematic of the historic civil disobedience of all runaway slaves, as well as the courageous support they received from others who defied fugitive slave laws and provided them life-saving assistance. The fight for the freedom of black Americans did not end with the Civil War. Let’s not forget those who resisted Jim Crow laws, such as Rosa Parks. She committed civil disobedience when she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama.

8. Everywhere, USA

From 1920 to 1933, America engaged in the nationwide, quixotic crusade against the importation, manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages known as Prohibition. People drank anyway. Women, who previously almost never showed up in bars, now guzzled in speakeasies and back alleys all over the country. Men built their own illegal stills and shot each other to gain market share. Crime rates soared. Juries often refused to convict obvious offenders, and at least one jury drank the evidence before declaring the accused to be innocent. When Woodrow Wilson departed the White House in January 1921, he took his stash of booze with him. His successor, Warren Harding, brought another one in. By the time the whole thing was abolished, people really needed the good, stiff drink they were imbibing all along. (See Prohibition’s Foes.)

9. Gandhi’s Famous Salt March

In British-ruled India, British companies enjoyed monopoly privileges. In 1882, the Salt Act forbade Indians from collecting or selling salt, a dietary staple. Resentment against the law and British rule in general eventually prompted Mohandas Gandhi’s famous Salt March in 1930. Huge numbers of Indians followed Gandhi in a peaceful protest for 240 miles to the Arabian Sea. More than 55,000 were arrested, but India eventually gained its independence in 1947.

10. Sophie and Hans Scholl’s Heroic Stand

Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans were students at the University of Munich when, at the height of Hitler’s power in 1942, they formed the White Rose Movement. By the thousands, they printed and distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi rule and atrocities against Jews. They never engaged in violence as they worked to undermine support for the regime. They were eventually found out, arrested, put on show trial, and beheaded. Their story is sadly but beautifully recounted in the 2005 film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.

11. Eastern Europe’s ‘Singing Revolution’

The Soviet Union’s “Evil Empire” unraveled in the pivotal year of 1989 but leading up to it, citizens from the Baltic states to Romania made life miserable for communist overlords. In Estonia, the “Singing Revolution” put widespread civil disobedience to music. In Poland, a flourishing underground produced massive black markets until the communist regime declared the country “ungovernable” and scheduled free elections. When Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu sent troops to arrest a pastor in Timisoara, unarmed congregants ringed the church to defend him. The soldiers refused to fire on them, and the Romanian Revolution was underway; the dictator was dead within a month.

—

Now I ask you, dear reader, where do you stand on each of these historic occasions of civil disobedience? Personally, I can say I applaud every one of them, wholeheartedly and without qualification. But then, as a former milk smuggler, maybe I’m biased.

The sermons of the American colonial preacher, Rev. Jonathan Mayhew (1720-1766), are credited as the inspiration for the Revolutionary motto, “Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

I would vote for Mayhew in an instant—twice, if I could.

This article first appeared at ELAmerican.com on January 7, 2020, where both English and Spanish versions are available.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post 11 of the Most Memorable Acts of Civil Disobedience in History appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

This touched off a separate Twitter conversation between a friend and I about who we personally considered the worst. Libertarian types can find something to complain about in every single person who has ever held that office, or soon will. But since saying “Well, they all suck” is a bit of a cop out, I chose to instead identify the suckiest and least suckiest presidents. Then I thought: “I should take this and make it into a column.” And so I did.

This week we’ll talk about the worst. Next week we’ll talk about the best—or at least the least offensive. (The former is easier to write for people like me than the latter.)

This isn’t a list of the most or least libertarian presidents; I instead tried to take a more Gestalt approach and evaluate them in a big picture way. To complicate matters a bit further, I’m going to split the shit list into two categories: worst presidents by policy and worst presidents by corruption and/or general incompetence.

Let’s get to it.

WORST PRESIDENTS BY POLICY (CHRONOLOGICAL)

John Adams

Our second president was also our very first one-term president, and for good reason. His backing of the Alien and Sedition Acts alone warrants his appearance on this list. He sucked up to monarchist Britain in their war against republican France, and was a little too enthusiastic about monarchism and Federal power in general.

Andrew Jackson

The original hotheaded, threatening, perpetually angry president. Think Trump, but with a military background. If Twitter had existed back then, one can only imagine Jackson being quite prolific there, rage-tweeting during his morning constitutional and the wee hours of the night.

Despite being a Southerner, he had no particular love for the South, especially South Carolina. (Which was awkward, considering that his first Vice President was South Carolina firebrand John Calhoun.) The Civil War almost started about thirty years early because of the Nullification Crisis. Jackson defended tariffs, threatened the Supreme Court, and laid the groundwork for the Trail of Tears.

Old Hickory was the worst thing to happen to Native Americans since smallpox. In spite of this, the town next door to me is named after him. As proof that some folks are impervious to irony, they named their high school’s sports teams…the Indians.

Abraham Lincoln

This one is going to get me in some trouble, because after all, Honest Abe freed the slaves, and everyone agrees that slavery is bad.

But at what cost? Somewhere north of 600,000 military deaths (counting both sides)? Suspending habeas corpus? The first national conscription? Wanton free speech violations? Preventing peaceful secession? Did the ends justify the means?

Worst of all, the Civil War cemented the idea that the federal government was supreme to those of the various states. That’s good in the case of slavery, but bad in many other ways. Some folks say this was when people stopped saying “the United States are” and started saying “the United States is.”

Lest you think the Great Emancipator was some enlightened champion of racial equality, as it turns out he held quite a low opinion of Black folks through most of his life. Right up until the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, he was willing to allow slavery to continue in places where it already existed, having tacitly endorsed the Corwin Amendment.

It would be harder to question Lincoln’s motives if he had just come out and said, from the start, that freeing the slaves was the ultimate goal. That’s not how he played it, though.

A skeptical person might be tempted to think that the Emancipation Proclamation was more of a toothless public relations move than an act of pure goodwill. Or a ploy to keep France and/or the United Kingdom out of the war.

Far be it from me to be a skeptic, though.

Woodrow Wilson

Dr. Jorgensen had a point: Wilson was a rolling disaster spread over two terms.

Under his presidency, America was saddled with such things as the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve system, and Prohibition. (Though to Wilson’s credit, he was at least mildly opposed to Prohibition.) He entered the country into World War I after promising to keep us out, and then sowed the seeds for World War II with his pie-in-the-sky contributions to the Treaty of Versailles. His lust for foreign intervention might make him the honorary first neocon. And oh yeah, he was the most overtly racist president besides those who, you know, actually owned slaves back in the day.

If there is an anti-intellectual undercurrent to American politics, it may be because of eggheads like Wilson.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I present to you the father of the modern welfare state. He implemented the New Deal, which set the precedent for government writing checks to individual people for doing…nothing. FDR virtually created the concept of “make-work.” He tried to pack the U.S. Supreme Court (an idea which is somehow now back in vogue in certain circles.) He took the United States off the gold standard.

While I do not believe he knew in advance about Pearl Harbor, let’s just say I doubt that he was terribly upset about it. During the World War II he desperately had wanted, he interned numerous citizens of Japanese, Italian, and German descent. Seeing himself as more worthy than George Washington, he served a preposterous three terms and part of a fourth.

Just, no.

Lyndon B. Johnson

If FDR gave birth to the modern U.S. welfare state, LBJ took that baby and gave it steroids. Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps can all be traced back to his “Great Society.” He escalated the Vietnam War. Certain aspects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 are troublesome to libertarians from a “freedom of association” perspective.

WORST PRESIDENTS BY CORRUPTION AND/OR GENERAL INCOMPETENCE (CHRONOLOGICAL)

James Buchanan

Reputed to possibly be America’s first gay president, Mr. Buchanan is mostly known for staring at his navel as Southern states started to secede following the election of Abraham Lincoln. (Though, that could also be viewed as a good thing from a certain point of view.) He also thought that the Dred Scott decision was just hunky-dory.

Andrew Johnson

Not only was he the first Vice President to ascend to the Oval Office, he was the only Vice President chosen from a different party than that of his Presidential candidate. He was allegedly drunk at his own swearing in.  What could possibly go wrong?

John Wilkes Booth, that’s what. A Southern Democrat ends up in charge of Reconstruction for almost four years. Hilarity ensued. It would have made a decent sitcom if sitcoms had been around in the 1860s.

His fights with the Radical Republican Congress culminated with his impeachment in 1868, in which he escaped conviction and removal from office by one vote. And he definitely violated the law that spurred his impeachment, even if the Supreme Court would much later cast doubt upon its validity.

Ulysses S. Grant

Alleged to have his own drinking problem (not that there’s anything wrong with that), Grant’s two administrations suffered from so many scandals that the scandals have a rather lengthy Wikipedia page all to themselves. A good time was had by all in D.C. under the former general; the South, not so much.

While Grant himself was never personally implicated in any of the many misadventures of his administrations, he gave his underlings very long leashes which they took full advantage of.

Warren Harding

Actually a fairly popular president, Harding had the good luck to die in office before most of his shit hit the fan. But hit the fan it did, including the amusingly titled Teapot Dome kerfuffle.

His Vice President would have to clean all that up; but we’ll talk about him next week.

Richard Nixon

People forget how popular Tricky Dick was before things hit the skids. He had served as Vice President for eight years under Eisenhower, then ran for president three times, losing (barely) the first time and then winning twice.

Less than two years before being ran out of office, he had won forty-nine states and a whopping 520 electoral votes. And though he was despised by the left, he was actually fairly liberal for a Republican. For goodness sake, he’s the president that got us out of Vietnam. They should’ve loved him for it.

Alas, Watergate was what it was and he had to go. His Vice President also had a mess to clean up, but didn’t do quite as good a job as Harding’s #2.

Bill Clinton

I’ve seen some folks jokingly call Bubba “the most conservative president of the twentieth century.” There’s some truth to it. He’s the last president to balance a budget, for example. How much of that was him and how much was a hostile Republican Congress is debatable.

Despite all of his political skills (which were considerable), Clinton was and still is a scumbag. And not just because of his horndog nature. Like Grant, he has his own Wikipedia page devoted to the various scandals. His wife contributed several of her own, but did not have the charisma to escape electoral consequences like he did.

His impeachment was well warranted. Folks like to say it was “just about sex,” while conveniently forgetting that he perjured himself about that same sex (a material fact if there ever was one) in the Paula Jones civil case while he was serving as President. Which, y’know, should be discouraged.

Donald Trump*

I have to put an asterisk on this one, since he’s still president and it takes several years for these things to flesh out or fully come to light. Furthermore, I still need to write a post mortem on his presidency if/when he ever actually concedes or leaves office. But hoo boy: this has to be one of the most disorganized, chaotic, feckless, and downright crazy administrations in American history. If not the absolute craziest.

His impeachment was also warranted, though I will admit that the case was not as cut-and-dried as Clinton’s was (or should have been.)

If Congress would actually convict and remove a president every now and then, perhaps we wouldn’t have to deal with such an imperial presidency.  Maybe they’ll actually convict next time they have the chance? Don’t bet on it. As George Carlin said: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

Next week we’ll look at the least harmful of our chief executives.

The post Fail to the Chief: The Worst Presidents appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

More on the filter and its female inventor in a moment. First, some interesting coffee facts I learned from personal experience or during research for this article.

The Evolution of Coffee

In the last 500 years, coffee went from an exotic libation confined to east Africa to as universal a beverage as there is, aside from water itself. According to historian Jonathan Morris in his Coffee: A Global History,

Coffee is a global beverage. It is grown commercially on four continents, and consumed enthusiastically in all seven: Antarctic scientists love their coffee. There is even an Italian espresso machine on the International Space Station.

I’ve been drinking coffee since 1982, but until a visit to Taiwan about five years ago, nothing else had eaten the beans before they became the grounds that made all the brown stimulant I drank.

It was in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei that I tried my first cup of coffee made from the droppings of civets, a tropical forest cat. The animal first eats the coffee cherries that fall to the ground, then excretes the beans—a truly “natural” de-pulping process. I couldn’t discern any special taste to the costly concoction, but I brought some home anyway just to introduce it to others. A long-time friend in Fuzhou, China still emails me from time to time and asks me if I’ve had any “sh*tty coffee” lately.

Coffee was likely first cultivated in Ethiopia in the 14th Century but a hundred years later, the epicenter of the coffee trade moved to Yemen, which then dominated the business for at least 200 years.

If you like a little chocolate mixed with your coffee, in what we today call a café mocha or a mochaccino, you’re drinking something whose name came from the city of Mocha in modern Yemen. From the late 15th Century to the early 18th, Mocha was the world’s leading port from which coffee was dispatched. By ship it traveled to cities throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean and east Africa.

The first coffee houses in Istanbul opened in 1554 and within 40 years, their number reached 600. They attracted people who enjoyed the drink while gossiping against the regime. Scorning the coffee houses as dens of subversive iniquity, Sultan Murad IV ordered them all closed in Istanbul in 1633 and throughout the Ottoman Empire shortly thereafter. Just like America’s prohibition of alcohol three centuries later, this one simply drove coffee drinking underground until the government surrendered a few years later.

By the 1780s, an astonishing 80 percent of the world’s coffee poured forth from Caribbean islands, and most of that from what is now the Dominican Republic. It wasn’t until the 19th Century that Brazil emerged as a major producer, followed by Colombia and the Central American states.

The Coffee-Sugar War

A fascinating but brief coffee-sugar war erupted between 1897 and 1903. The principal figures involved were the American entrepreneurs Henry Osborne Havemeyer of American Sugar Refining Company and John Arbuckle of the giant coffee firm, Arbuckle Brothers. When Arbuckle decided to challenge Havemeyer by entering the sugar market, Havemeyer retaliated by muscling in on the coffee business.

The result was a price war from which both sugar and coffee consumers greatly benefited, but which yielded millions of dollars in losses for the two companies. It’s one of many failures of that great bogeyman theory, predatory price cutting. You can read more about it in FEE’s archives here.

It may come as a surprise but it’s the natural oils in coffee to which we owe the entirety of its glorious taste. As Antony Wild explains in Coffee: A Dark History,

Most coffee oils are immensely complex and have foiled the best efforts of scientists to simulate them adequately, which explains why artificial coffee flavoring is without exception of a poor standard. Although these oils constitute less than 3 percent of the end product by weight, without their presence coffee would neither smell nor taste of anything. In effect, 97 percent of the coffee one buys by weight is tasteless, baked vegetable matter and caffeine, which is unaffected by the roasting process and constitutes between 3 and 6 percent of the final weight of the coffee.

Until the early 20th Century, all the major names associated with coffee were those of men—from sultans to shippers to industrialists. Then along came a diminutive housewife in Dresden, Germany named Melitta Bentz. In classic entrepreneurial fashion, she was alert to a problem, solved it, then took the risk of creating a company to market her invention, and succeeded.

Melitta’s Contribution

Melitta Bentz was 35 in 1908 and frustrated with grounds in her coffee. It was a common complaint but one the rest of the world seemed willing to tolerate. Percolators of the day over-brewed coffee at the expense of its taste, imparting an annoying bitter flavor. Linen rags would retain the grounds but were messy and required frequent cleaning. Surely, something else could provide an appealing compromise, she thought, and be quicker, easier and cleaner.

She experimented with several materials. She wasn’t satisfied with any of them until she grabbed some blotting paper from her son’s school book, punctured it multiple times with a nail, put it in a brass pot she filled with coffee grounds, then poured hot water over it. Bingo! No bitterness, no grounds! It was an instant hit with her friends, switching on the proverbial light in Melitta’s entrepreneurial brain.

Melitta was granted a patent for her filter in July 1908 and within months, her company was up and running with its initial four employees: Melitta herself plus her husband Hugo and sons Willy and Horst. Producing filters at first within their home, they sold more than a thousand of them at the Leipzig Fair in 1909. Demand for the simple, newfangled invention exploded thereafter. In 1936, Melitta improvised her original design and turned her filter into the now-famous cone shape with which we are all familiar.

Melitta’s Legacy

Production of the filters was paused briefly by World Wars I and II but surged again afterwards in each case. But for those interruptions, the family-owned business flourished for decades, even after Melitta’s death in 1950. Today it employs thousands in Germany, Florida and New Jersey. A belated obituary in The New York Times in 2015 quoted a company spokesperson as saying,

Most Melitta locations still have a photograph of her on the wall. Every employee knows Melitta Bentz and her exceptional role as the mother of the corporation.

I don’t know if the millions of coffee filters sold by her company made Melitta Bentz rich or not. I’m guessing she might well have made it into the income category some envious people disparagingly label as “the one-percent.” If so, that would actually make my coffee taste even better.

Melitta Bentz is an important figure in the storied history of one of the world’s most popular beverages. She came up with a better idea. She possessed the courage to invest in it. She earned the willing patronage of millions of happy customers. She employed thousands of people. She hurt no one in the process; indeed, she left the world in a small way better than when she found it.

Not bad for a housewife from Dresden.

For additional information, see:

“John Arbuckle: Entrepreneur, Trust-Buster, Humanitarian” by Clayton A. Coppin

“The Predatory Bogeyman” by Lawrence W. Reed

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed the World by Mark Pendergrast

Coffee: A Global History by Jonathan Morris

Coffee: A Dark History by Antony Wild

A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World by Jeannette M. Fregulia

“Overlooked No More: Melitta Bentz, Who Invented the Coffee Filter” by Claire Moses

“Melitta Bentz, Beating the Grinds” – A 4-Minute Video

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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However, it would be wise to be careful in using these surveys. Not because they are flawed but rather because presidents care about them.

While presidents earn prestige while in office which translates into remunerative book deals, lecture fees and consulting gigs, they also care about their prestige in history books. The chances of eternal recognition in the history books are alluring. Thus, presidents do not only try to appeal to voters. They also appeal to the constituency of historians and presidential scholars who will interpret their presidency and the way it is taught in history books and classes.

This mindfulness for historical reputation implies that presidents will act in ways that historians can observe. In other words, proactive presidents leave bread crumbs in the forest that historians can use to generate their assessments. Inactive presidents leave fewer crumbs making it harder to assess them.

This may seem like a trivial statement, but it has important ramifications for our assessment of how presidents affect living standards. In certain situations, inaction and restraint are superior to proactivity. Consider the example of the Great Depression. While some of the policy changes during the Depression had positive effects, the vast majority did not. The New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, which took up certain policies of Herbert Hoover, was an inconsistent set of policies adopted for the purpose of appearing proactive. Based on strange ideas regarding economic theory (which many argued to be wrong even then), the policies lengthened and deepened the Depression. Inaction, in such a situation, would have been preferable to proactivity.

However, presidents are biased in favor of proactivity even when inaction is preferable. This means that there is an incentive to act, at least sometimes, against what is the superior course of action to improve human well-being. While the example of the Great Depression is an extreme one, milder illustrations are available. More government spending is more easily observable even if that spending may slow down economic growth. A larger army and more interventions abroad are easy to observe but they may make things worse for both Americans and foreigners.

To measure this bias, Philip Magness, Frank Garmon Jr. and myself attempted to create a measure of presidential restraint. “Restraint” can be either willful (such as proposals to reduce government spending) or they can occur in spite of the president’s wishes to be proactive (such as when a president faces a Congress held by opposing parties). We assembled information about the size of the army, foreign interventions, the number of vetoed bills, the size of government and the composition of Congress. We used these measures to see how well they predicted the scores obtained on surveys of presidential greatness such as the C-Span survey (as well as others).

What we found confirmed the intuition laid out above: restraint carries sizable reputational penalties (meaning that proactivity comes with a premium). The largest of these penalties stemmed from whether or not a president faced a Congress controlled by an opposing party. This is a particularly crucial result in our work and for our assessment of presidential performance. Facing a divided government is not willful restraint. It is a restraint imposed on presidents who would otherwise have the chance to be more proactive. This restraint is, to use the breadcrumbs in the forest analogy again, the equivalent of giving fewer breadcrumbs to presidents.

Bear this logic in mind during the election cycle. The men and women who are contending for power want to be seen to get your vote. They also want to be seen by historians and social scientists who will bear judgment upon their presidencies in the books they will write. This desire is powerful and could lead them to act in ways detrimental to human well-being broadly speaking if it conflicts with their desires to be seen.

The post Enough of this Idea of Presidential Greatness appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia

It has become common to say that the United States in 2020 is more divided politically and culturally than at any other point in our national past.

As a historian who has written and taught about the Civil War era for several decades, I know that current divisions pale in comparison to those of the mid-19th century.

Between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army at Appomattox in April 1865, the nation literally broke apart.

More than 3 million men took up arms, and hundreds of thousands of black and white civilians in the Confederacy became refugees. Four million enslaved African Americans were freed from bondage.

After the war ended, the country soon entered a decade of virulent, and often violent, disagreement about how best to order a biracial society in the absence of slavery.

To compare anything that has transpired in the past few years to this cataclysmic upheaval represents a spectacular lack of understanding about American history.

Caning, secession, assassination

A few examples illustrate the profound difference between divisions during the Civil War era and those of the recent past.

Today, prominent actors often use awards ceremonies as a platform to express unhappiness with current political leaders.

On April 14, 1865, a member of the most celebrated family of actors in the United States expressed his unhappiness with Abraham Lincoln by shooting him in the back of the head.

Today, Americans regularly hear and watch members of Congress direct rhetorical barbs at one another during congressional hearings and in other venues.

On May 22, 1856, U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into bloody insensibility on the floor of the Senate chamber because Sumner had criticized one of Brooks’ kinsmen for embracing “the harlot, Slavery” as his “mistress.”

Recent elections have provoked posturing about how Texas or California might break away from the rest of the nation.

But after a Republican president was elected in 1860, seven slaveholding states seceded between Dec. 20 and Feb. 1, 1861. Four of the remaining eight slaveholding states followed suit between April and June 1861.

Internal fractures, furious war

Americans were thus forced to face the reality that the political system established by the founding generation had failed to manage internal fractures and positioned the United States and the newly established Confederacy to engage in open warfare.

The scale and fury of the ensuing combat underscores the utter inappropriateness of claims that the United States is more divided now than ever before.

Four years of civil war produced at least 620,000 military deaths – the equivalent of approximately 6.5 million dead in the United States of 2020.

The institution of slavery – and especially its potential spread from the South and border states into federal territories – was the key to this slaughter because it provoked the series of crises that eventually proved intractable.

No political issue in 2020 approaches slavery in the mid-19th century in terms of potential divisiveness.

[Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day.]

Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War, Emeritus, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Think the US is more polarized than ever? You don’t know history appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Mary Margaret Olohaney

The curriculum comes after New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a 2019 law requiring all public schools to include LGBTQ lessons in middle school and high school lesson plans, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. New Jersey joins California, Colorado, and Illinois in requiring public schools to teach LGBTQ history.

While some educators are testing out the mandate, the law will go into effect starting with the 2020-2021 school year.

Under the law, students may be taught about the “thousands of gay men put in Nazi concentration camps and forced to wear pink triangles or about other significant moments in the gay rights movement,” the Philadephia Inquirer reported.

Student Olivia Loesch — who is a sophomore at Haddon Heights High School, came out as gay in seventh grade, and identifies as gender-queer — attends school in a district where teachers are testing out the pilot curriculum.

Loesch was assigned a school history project on the Holocaust and decided to use a pink triangle that the Nazis used to harass gay men in concentration camps.

“I never knew about it,” Loesch said. “I feel that the topic should be talked about and people should know about me.”

The advocacy group Garden State Equality is a driving force behind this LGBTQ instruction.

Members from across North Jersey came together tonight at our office to help implement the new LGBTQ+ curriculum in partnership with @GSEquality and Make it Better for Youth. @NJEA pic.twitter.com/JwSta5l5N4

— ECEA (@ECEANJORG) January 15, 2020

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post New Jersey Teachers Prep Lesson Plans On LGBTQ History, Homosexual Persecution During Holocaust appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The tasty snack has become a cultural obsession and a fixture of American pop culture. Who can forget eight-year-old King Curtis on ABC’s Wife Swap running away when he is told he can’t eat bacon? Or Ron Swanson, after being served a rather meager-looking steak, ordering a waiter to “just bring me all the bacon and eggs you have”?

To help you better understand the majesty of bacon, we’ve compiled a list of 15 economic, historic, and health facts about this wondrous food.*

1. Americans spend $5 billion on bacon … annually

America is currently in the midst of a decades-long trend of “bacon mania.” In 2018, bacon accounted for $4.9 billion in US sales, up from $4.7 billion the previous year and an increase of more than 20 percent from 2012.

2. Research suggests there are cognitive benefits of eating bacon

Most health research focuses on bacon’s negative impact. (So typical, right?) However, some research shows positive health outcomes associated with bacon consumption. A University of North Carolina study, for example, found that choline, a micronutrient in bacon, is key to healthy brain development in unborn babies. You got that, moms? You have an excuse to eat bacon.

3. Bacon is environmentally friendly

Americans don’t appear to need more reasons to eat bacon (beyond its deliciousness), but they might have some. Turns out bacon and pork have a much smaller carbon footprint than beef. One recent study, for example, concluded that growing beef requires 28 times more land and 11 times more water than bacon and pork (as well as other foods such as eggs and chicken).

4. Bacon is 86 percent cheaper than it was 100 years ago

In 2014, Fox News reported that bacon prices hit “a new all-time high” after reaching “a whopping $6.11 per pound.” As bacon lovers worldwide already knew, the price, which soon fell when consumers and producers adjusted, was abnormally high—up 40 percent from just two years before. However, bacon wasn’t really more expensive than ever.

As Marian Tupy has shown, the price of bacon, when adjusting for wages and inflation, is about 86 percent less today than it was 100 years ago. (Think about this next time you’re at the grocery store selecting a package of delicious bacon, and give thanks to your free-market economy.) If Fox News had used real prices instead of nominal prices, they would have found that those “all-time high” prices were still a fraction of the real cost of bacon in, say, 1919, when the nominal price was $0.53 a pound and average nominal wages were $0.25 an hour.

5. Bacon first appeared in China thousands of years ago

Americans may love their bacon, but the savory snack predates the discovery of the New World by thousands of years. Food historians say salted pork belly first appeared in China around 1500 BC.

6. Americans eat 18 lbs. of bacon … annually

A typical American consumes 18 pounds of bacon each year. That weight is slightly less than your average car tire.

7. The word “Bacon” has German and Frankish roots

As previously mentioned, bacon was popular in China and, later, in the Roman world. But they didn’t call it bacon, of course. The Romans called it Petaso, and I don’t know what the Chinese called it. But in the Middle Ages, Germanic people began to refer to cured pork as “bak,” meaning the back of a pig. The Franks adapted this to “bakko,” which evolved to “bakkon” in English.

8. Bacon is really nutritious

Bacon is high in saturated fat and contains additives such as nitrates and nitrites that cause concern among scientists who fear it could be linked to gastric cancer (more on that later). However, overall bacon is a hearty and nutritious food packed with essential vitamins and nutrients. As Healthline points out, bacon contains:

–  Vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, and B12

–  37 grams of high-quality animal protein

–  89 percent of the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for selenium

–  53 percent of the RDA for phosphorus

–  Plenty of minerals such as iron, magnesium, zinc, and potassium

In fact …

9. There are fewer calories in three slices of bacon than a can of pop

A serving of bacon is three average-sized slices. Each serving, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, contains 7.5 grams of protein; nine grams of fat (3.8 of which are saturated); 30 milligrams of cholesterol; 435 milligrams of sodium; and 120 calories. A 12-ounce can of Pepsi, meanwhile, has zero grams of protein and 150 calories.

10. A serving of bacon accounts for about one-fifth of the recommended daily fat

To put that nine grams of fat figure (see above) into perspective, the RDA of fat is 44-77 grams per day. That means three pieces of bacon counts for at most 20 percent of your daily recommended fat intake. Sure, the saturated fat intake is higher than one would like, but hardly off the charts.

11. 70 percent of bacon is consumed at breakfast

Bacon is popular in restaurants where it’s used in a variety of ways by chefs—on sandwiches and burgers, pasta and appetizers. Still, it remains predominantly a breakfast food. In fact, 70 percent of all bacon is consumed at breakfast, surveys show.

12. A majority want to make bacon America’s national food

America’s enthusiasm for bacon goes well beyond pseudo churches and fringe academies, however. A survey conducted in 2014 by Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork supplier, found that 65 percent of Americans would make bacon America’s “national food.”

13. There’s a bacon academy in the US

Ancient Romans and Chinese may have enjoyed bacon, but they probably didn’t have bacon academies. The United States does. Camp Bacon, held annually in Ann Arbor, Michigan, allows bacon enthusiasts to listen to speakers, take cooking classes, and learn about all things bacon. If you think that’s crazy, consider this next factoid …

14. Some Americans worship bacon (sort of)

Few people likely know that there is officially a bacon religion. That’s right. The United Church of Bacon has more than 25,000 members around the world. The church, whose official symbol is two slices of bacon worshiping the sun, has even performed hundreds of weddings. True, the faith was launched as a parody religion by skeptics, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its tried and true believers don’t take its seventh commandment—to praise bacon—seriously.

15. The World Health Organization says bacon can cause cancer, BUT …

Scientists have long suspected there was a link between bacon and cancer. For many, the link became official in 2015, when the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that every daily portion of processed meat (including bacon) raises the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent. What many overlooked was how small the relative risk was, according to the 22 medical researchers.

“We’re talking about relative risk,” Lisa Cimperman, a registered dietitian at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, told Time magazine. “That means that, for a healthy person, eating bacon every day will raise their overall risk of colon cancer from something like 5% to 6%.”

Trade-Offs and Bacon

So is eating bacon good or bad? Like many things, it’s all about trade-offs.

In economics, it’s the idea that we sacrifice one thing to gain another. By foregoing bacon, one can lower the intake of saturated fats and marginally lower one’s risk of cancer and heart disease. But by doing so she’ll also miss out on certain vitamins and nutrients important to human bodies (not to mention its delicious taste). Better understanding the benefits and costs of bacon can help individuals make informed decisions, but people will ultimately decide for themselves if the benefits outweigh the costs. For now, at least, Americans are siding with Ron Swanson.

*Disclaimer: This writer endorses the consumption of bacon and believes it should be eaten at every reasonable opportunity. However, he (thankfully) is not a nutritional expert.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The post 15 Economic, Historical, and Health Facts about Bacon appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Happy Sunday, Liberty Lovers!

In memory of the 78th anniversary of the December 7th Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, I decided to watch Michael Bay’s 2001 “Pearl Harbor” film.

I’ve always heard it has a great love story in it. I was hoping I’d learn more about the historical background of Pearl Harbor by watching this movie. Unfortunately, this is not the best movie for learning history fun facts because a lot of it is inaccurate!

In this video, I will tell you the blunt truth about my “Pearl Harbor” experience. I probably should’ve just watched a documentary.

All in all, war sucks!

Be Free!
Steffi

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I, Caleb Scott Shumate, was born to parents Scott and Sherry Shumate on December 24, 1992 in Greenville, North Carolina. As I mentioned, I had to fight for my life from day one because I was born two-and-a-half months premature which resulted in my diagnosis of cerebral palsy at 18 months old.

I was fortunate to have parents who have loved me dearly from the beginning, and have pushed and motivated me to become independent for as long as I can remember. I daresay that independent spirit instilled in me since my earliest days played an important role in molding the warrior for liberty that I am today.

For as long as I can remember, I have always had a deep love for history of all kinds, but especially American history. Perhaps it was partly due to my limited ability to play like most kids I went to school with, but my love for history was my primary source of entertainment in my free time because I always saw history as it is – a long and continuous story of individuals who lived and died, some of which did wonderful things and some great evil. It would come alive to me. I could almost feel I was in the places and times I was reading about. So while most kids played during recess, I had my nose stuck in a book of some sort.

I was a fun-loving child who loved life and always tried to be a friend to nearly everyone I knew. However, that started to change when I was 13, and my family had to move from the mountains of North Carolina where I grew up to the Eastern Coastal Plain. I left behind my grandparents (whom I have always been close to) and the friends I had known nearly my whole life. When I reached my junior year of high school, I was bullied pretty severely, which caused me to struggle with depression and suicidal tendencies. These worsened as I entered adulthood and fought with everything a young man deals with – from trying to find his place in the world to finding love and facing constant rejection.

I was placed on Medicare and Medicaid at the age of 18 against my will. Even before I became politically active in my early twenties or even knew what a libertarian was, and the racist history behind the Welfare State and its ties to eugenics and literal modern-day slavery, I knew in my heart that it was morally wrong for me to live off money that was not earned by my own labor. This flies in the face of every stereotype that people would expect from me as a “disabled” man. They would expect me to be okay with sitting on my ass and collecting a check from the government each month. I am not only dissatisfied with it, but I am also angered by it.

Why am I angry? I am angry because I have been unable to work and make a living in this world because, on top of all the struggles I face when it comes to finding work as a natural consequence of my disability, the Welfare State makes it impossible for me to even attempt to make a living. If I do find work and make above a certain amount, I lose my “benefits.”

You see, this is exactly how Progressives want it. Don’t believe me? Don’t take my word for it. Read the words of Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who was the commissioner of labor statistics for Woodrow Wilson’s administration. He easily explained how policies such as the minimum wage and welfare state could be used to exterminate individuals like myself, the so-called undesirables – “It is much better to enact a minimum- wage law even if it deprives the unfortunates of work…better the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize the incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”

I can’t begin to describe to you, my dear readers, how livid, but honestly unsurprised I was by this discovery. To think that someone would be so evil as to use force to extort money from the American worker, and to then use that money in an attempt to keep the physically disabled from working so they could quite literally do with economic power what Hitler did with the gas chambers! I tell you, my friends, economic liberty is truly individual liberty, and I will not stop until the welfare state is utterly demolished.

I know firsthand how wasteful and inefficient these programs are. As I type this, I sit in an uncomfortable wheelchair that squeaks worse than an old rocking chair just from sitting down. Bolts that hold the back together have come out unassisted several times, and I can only get a replacement once every five years. This is just one of the many pains in my ass I have had to endure. I say this not for sympathy, but only to tell you that I know personally how much more effective personal charity is than government welfare. I know from life experience what it’s like not being able to get the help I need when I need it. The only honest and effective solution to these ills is the complete and total abolition of the welfare state and freeing up private social institutions such as churches, synagogues, etc. to do the work they want to do. We have unlimited rights, but our rights also come with certain responsibilities. If we want the government to get off our backs and do less, we as individuals must do more.

I am a libertarian because I believe that there is both good and bad in all individuals, but if given the freedom to do what is moral, more will choose the high road over the low one. I believe that being forced to do good for your fellow man at gunpoint is genuinely not good at all.

I want to say a particular word of thanks to Austin Petersen and my number one editor, Camellia Plosser. Thank you, both. Austin, for giving me a platform so that I can advocate for ideas we both cherish, for polishing my talent until I shine, as well as providing an avenue to better myself in life. But most of all, thank you for your love, support, and friendship. Camellia, thank you for making sure I always sound my best, and making sure my writing reaches its peak performance and is always crystal clear. I am grateful for your kind heart and love. Without the two of you and your encouragement, these words might not have been printed. I am truly grateful for that.

I also want to say a word of thanks to my family and friends who have known about my battles, loved me without fail, and supported me to get to this point. Thank you also to Bobby Aycock and Ken Tucker for seeing my personal gift for communicating when I couldn’t, and for being unwilling to allow me to waste them.

I have been through hell in my personal life, and it has hardened and strengthened me for this fight. Not unlike the signers of the Declaration of Independence, I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor to the pursuit of liberty. I was born a warrior forged in fire and I will never stop fighting until the battle is won! I have nowhere to go but up, and I see a bright future ahead. But, we must fight hard to come out on the other side. I am convinced through studying our history, that we will weather the storm – because that’s who we are when the chips are down. Victory or death!

The post Nobody’s Victim: This Disabled Libertarian Opposes the Welfare State appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.