Execupundit.com

Thursday, April 01, 2021

April Fool's Pranks

Wally Bock explains why he doesn't do them.

Good move.

Resignation

"I was upset with the direction in which some people were taking the Board so I resigned."

"Well, I suppose that will show them. Of course, you'll no longer be there to voice a different opinion and they may be able to get a more pliable person named to replace you. The memory of your resignation will probably fade within a couple of weeks, if not sooner, and I bet your adversaries popped champagne at the news of your departure. But, aside from those considerations, it must have felt good to resign."

Culture and Crime

Latzer’s thesis is that such factors as poverty and the rule of law are less relevant to the level of violence in a given place than are the combination of cultures there. Thus, notwithstanding its lawlessness, the Old West was in fact much less violent than we have been led to believe (at least by the end of the nineteenth century). And while most immigrants to the New World experienced similar levels of crushing poverty, crime rates varied widely between them. Newly arriving Jews and Italians were both poor, but Italians were more crime-prone than Jews—indicating, in Latzer’s view, that what matters for criminal offending is the cultural proclivity to violence.

Read the rest of the City Journal review of Barry Latzer's The Roots of Violent Crime in America.

Another British - EU Negotiation

Beware of Those for Whom Politics is a Religion

I spent twenty years of my life in a country whose official ideology, when confronted with any human problem, was always to reduce it to a political phenomenon. (This ideological passion for the reduction of man is the evil that those of us coming from "back there" have learned to despise the most.)

- Milan Kundera