There are times when you read an article or news report and just for a moment, you think it must be a joke. The link below will take you to one of those moments; an action taken in the name of political correctness that is not only short sighted, but also clearly stupid. Ms. Stein, who joined the museum earlier this year, fired all the docents (who are all volunteers) because they were all white women.  Apparently, because they are all white, visitors of “color” are offended or cannot comprehend what the docents are saying. Or the docents cannot explain how the Impressionistic painting at the museum relate to the experiences of a person of “color.”  Instead, those visitors will be free to wander the halls and view many of the 300,000 works of art on their own, creating their own “truth”. When criticized by the Chicago Tribune for the action, the Chairman of the Art Institute defended the action with the following words: ““Critical self-reflection and participatory, recuperative action is required if we are to remain relevant to the changing audiences seeking connection to art.” What? Would you buy a car from a salesman who speaks like that?

To become a docent, the volunteer is “engaged in eighteen months of twice-a-week training to qualify as a docent, five years of continual research and writing to meet the criteria of 13 museum content areas, and monthly and bi-weekly trainings to further educate ourselves with the materials, processes and cultural context” of the Art Institute’s collection. Clearly this type of knowledge and dedication must be stopped. And what will Ms. Stein do to replace these women with all their expertise? Well, nothing at the current time, but I am sure with her obviously brilliant management expertise, she shall be able to produce a solution in no time.

Once again, political correctness leads to a lowering of standards and to ignorance.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/indecency-art-institute-of-chicago-docents-diversity-firing-11634310172?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The world, and the United States in particular has done much to protect our environment. Yet, the nature of mankind is to move forward, and we often find that our own laws and regulations which are designed to protect our environment hinder our natural desire to grown. How do we balance protection vs. growth? The link below provides some examples of the imbalance that can occur with the best of intentions. It should not take years, often up to a decade, tens of thousands of pages and many lawsuits to achieve balance. Unfettered grown can be a blight for all of us, but laws which increase the costs of progress many times delay growth and can lead to even greater environmental problems. Congress, even a split Congress should be able to act to solve the problems, but those who oppose change, including the Federal bureaucracy itself must be challenged. Obstruction is not free and the ones who ultimately pay are the taxpayers themselves who receive smaller benefits at a greater cost.

https://www.city-journal.org/when-environmental-regulations-backfire

Not exactly the most exciting title for a book, I am sure it would have sold better if it were “The Company Who Insured the Concentration Camps.”  But despite its droll title, the book can be interesting in realizing that even in a totalitarian regime such as Hitler’s, the reality of business must go on.

Dr. Feldman commissioned in 1997 by the Board of Management of Allianz (the world’s largest insurance company) to author the story of Allianz during the war.  He states that he the company was fully co-operative and given his intellectual credentials, I take the book to be accurate and balanced. Allianz, along with a number of other European insurance companies was being charged in a number of class action lawsuits regarding how they discharged their duties to Jewish policy holders. Additionally, there were newspaper stories regarding how Allianz insured various SS-owned factories in concentration camps. Questions were being raised in several quarters regarding how closely Allianz worked with the Nazi regime and how Kurt Schmitt who the general director of Allianz between was 1921-33 became Hitler’s second Reich Economics Minister between 1933-34.

Before accepting the commission, Dr. Feldman (a distinguished professor at Berkeley) insisted that he have access to all records, individuals, etc., and Allianz to its credit provided free access to any materials which had survived the war. But the task was huge as man companies which did business with the Nazi regime tried to paint themselves as victims of the regime and as being held hostage to the rules and polices of that time. Indeed, the same questions which were asked of individuals who lived under such a regime (the degree of collaboration or resistance too) were being asked of companies throughout occupied Europe.

Finally, the life and times of an insurance company is not the most exciting topic for the average historian, even one interested in economic history. Yet, Dr. Feldman does an admirable job of taking the reader through Board meetings, national conferences with the major Nazi players, the fights for business, how claims for Kristallnacht Nacht were handled (the Party did not want the Jews compensated and wanted to seize the funds which would have been compensation, the insurance companies were reluctant to pay claims as the action was “political” and thus outside of the policies borders,  the economists were upset that replacing the broken glass which largely came from Belgium put a drain on foreign currency reserves which impacted the build-up of the military), etc. Meetings between the insurance companies, Goring, Goebbels, etc. were lengthy and often heated until a compromise was hammered out.

We also see the problem of the Jewish employees of Allianz; the regime put increased pressure on Allianz to fire Jewish salesmen, clerks, etc. Then when Allianz continued to pay the fired agents for the commissions on their business, the regime began to take aim at Allianz for not in effect, boycotting Jewish business. Again, lengthy meetings at several governmental levels with numerous agencies.

As the war went on and new territories were occupied, Allianz and other German insurance firms raced to buy up the insurance firms in Poland, France, etc. Indeed, as late as April 1945, just one month from the collapse of Nazi Germany, some insurance companies were trying to expand in territories about to be occupied by the Soviets! As many of the employees of Allianz were military age, most were called up to serve in the armed services. Should drafted salesmen continue to be paid their commissions when someone else must service their accounts? How were clerical personnel to be replaced and trained when most of the replacements were retired or disabled and not up to the physical demands of the job (the company continued to operate from its various offices throughout the bombing raids).

In the end, the book is an interesting business book as the demands of a war and regime that was not exactly business savvy gives us a glimpse into the everyday problems of a company like Allianz. The reading can be harder as there are so many individuals of whom the reader will never again run across so who reports to who in which department can be difficult.

So, the question is: did Allianz co-operate with the Nazi regime during that period and did they in fact insure various facilities at the concentration camps. Yes, and yes with caveats; they co-operated to continue as did hundreds of other companies and millions of individuals. There is no indication that. y financed the Party (unlike Krupp and others) nor did the management participate in the racial or other political goals of the time. They did employ for as long as possible Jewish employees, paid them their commissions, etc., and tried to continue their pre-war drive to create an Allianz set of corporate-employee values.

An interesting book if you have the patience and a score card to keep track of the players.

The linked article provides, and embedded videos provide excellent examples of the pros and cons of each side. Be sure to spend time on the video with Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto as he presents his case vs. two opponents who come at him from two different angles.

Peterson rise to wide social prominence during the discussions in Canada regarding C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act by adding “gender identity or expression” as a prohibited ground of discrimination. It also extended hate speech laws to include these two terms “gender identity” and “gender expression” and made it a hate crime to target someone for being transgender, publicly inciting hatred or advocating genocide. The question during debate, is the definition of “hate speech;” is disagreement in speech a right of free speech or can it be interpreted as “hate speech”? For example, can a woman be charged with hate speech if she objects to a trans individual using the same changing or rest room? Can a male inmate who “identifies” as a woman demand to be housed in a female prison and can female inmates who object be charged with a hate crime?

If you are not conversant with this subject, be prepared!

https://quillette.com/2021/09/21/the-progressive-case-for-renouncing-gender-extremism-last-of-a-three-part-series/

About once every decade I treat myself to Anatoli Rybakov’s wonderful trilogy (Children of the Arbat, Fear and Dust and Ashes). Rybakov himself, like his main character, Sasha, was arrested in 1933 and sent to Siberia for three years. That was before the main Stalinist terror and purges which only a couple of short years later would have merited a term of ten or twenty years. After his release, he was barred from most major cities as his internal passport showed that he had been convicted of a crime against the state. Working odd jobs, he was called up into the army after the German invasion of 1941and was twice decorated. After the war, he continued to write but it was not until Gorbachev and glasnost that the first of his trilogy was published at which time, he won international fame. He continued to write until his death in December 1999 at the age of eighty-seven.

The trilogy traces some of the idealistic youth of the early 1930s in the Soviet Union, as they hoped for a better future. Most were members of the Soviet youth movement, the Komsomol which served as a propaganda arm of the Party, aimed at molding strong Soviet citizens. The book traces the lives of various members, such as Sasha who was convicted of anti-Soviet propaganda when his poster at school was deemed to mock various Party members at his school. Some students keep their belief in the Party, one becomes a member of the NKVD and manages to survive the great purge of the secret police while another is thrown into poverty when her high Party ranking father is arrested in the middle of the night.

As Bjorn Lomborg states in his article, Africa produces more energy from renewables than anywhere else in the world, but they also have 700,000 deaths from indoor pollution caused by renewable energy. It is a tragic figure yet it is all but ignored by those who lead the charge towards renewable energy.

Equally as disturbing is the fact that by now, world leaders realize that there is no way to reach their green energy goals in 2030, 2040, or 2050. In short, now is not the time to sell your old energy technology stocks as there is not enough time, money nor technology to rid the world of fossil fuels.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdown-climate-fossil-fuels-electricity-energy-production-africa-carbon-emission-11632943155

“The best laid schemes of mice and men can still go wrong” and so it is with the plans of the nations and their egos. Mankind has always tried to move forward but history has shown us that there is a natural progression to our progress. We cannot force an issue and all the fabricated rules and laws written to support a policy fail when faced with reality. As much as we use technology, it only works when it is developed reasonably and naturally. Any rush to implementation by mankind always runs up against reality.

There is no doubt that in many parts of the country, the term “starter house” means entering a bidding war where the starting point in California is $440,000 and the median cost is about $800,000. Could it be due to, in California, a Code of Regulations on housing is over 21,000,000 words in length, or because all new houses must have solar panels which add about $8,000 or more to each new house? Of course not, as the government, both State and Federal are there to “solve” the housing problem. We might very well have a housing problem because of the State and Federal regulations which aim at taking away local control of housing and centralizing all decisions by bureaucrats far from those who lives they attempt too “better.”

In 1929, the Soviet government decided to create a Soviet homeland for Jews.  The Jews who had been forced under the Tsars to live “beyond the Pale” could finally have their own homeland, free from oppression, pogroms, etc., and create a wonderful Soviet paradise.  The only problem was, that the area afforded the Jews, Birodidzhan, an area of 14,800 squa miles (Israel encompasses 9,800 square miles) made current day pre-Israel land look like a garden of paradise.  With little water, forested mountains, swamps, many bugs and wild animals, few roads and no natural resources, it offered little to Jews who migrated there, mostly from the cities of the Soviet Union.  Ill prepared for frontier life (many settlers were artists, poets, etc.), many gave up when they realized that there were no paved roads, few buildings (most “settlers” lived in tents) and little if any help from the central government.