The truth about those Russian kids’ camps

[Update 04/05/2023]. It seems that some children are being evacuated from the Ukrainian war zone indefinitely and placed in Russian foster homes.  Some of them are orphans.  There is no evidence that this is being done against the will of parents.

Russia says ready to return children if parents ask for them by the South China Morning Post.

• The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children to a network of camps inside Russia. The warrant was based on a report by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab center, which is funded by the U.S.  State Department.
• U.S. journalist Jeremy Loffredo visited one of Russian government-sponsored camps in question.  At the Donbas Express, located just outside of Moscow, Loffredo met youth from war-torn regions who were flourishing thanks to free music instruction, and grateful to be in a secure environment.  
• A Grayzone review of the Yale HRL report found the paper’s content contradicted many claims contained in the ICC warrant.  It also undercut incendiary statements its director, Nathaniel Raymond, issued during media appearances.
• In an interview with Loffredo, Yale HRL’s Raymond further contradicted allegations he made in a CNN interview about a massive “hostage situation” underway in Russia, acknowledging that most of the camps he researched were “teddy bear”-like cultural programs.  He also disclosed his collaboration with U.S. intelligence.

ICC’s Putin arrest warrant based on State Dept. funded report that debunked itself by Jeffrey Loffredo and Max Blumenthal for The Grayzone.

∞∞∞

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, commissioner of children’s rights, have been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of kidnaping thousands of Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia to be Russianized.

An investigation by the Grayzone has shown this to be the opposite of the truth.  The children are from families in Ukraine who consider themselves Russian.  

They are fighting to prevent their children from being forcibly Ukrainianized – that is, forbidden to speak the Russian language, attend the Russian Orthodox Church and learn about Russian culture.

The children went to Russia temporarily, with their parents’ consent, to enjoy musical education and to be temporarily safe from life in a war zone.

Jeremy Loffredo, a journalist, was in Russia in November, 2022, and happened to visit one of these camps, the Donbass Expresss, not knowing it was to be the subject on an international criminal case.   He saw happy children, singing and learning to play musical instruments.  True, they sang Russian songs

Loffredo then checked the Yale HRL report, on which the charges are based.  The writers of the report never visited the youth camps, never attempted to contact parents and did all their research online.

Yet the report does not deny the basic truth of what Loffredo said – that at least many of the children went to the camps with their parents’ consent, took part in harmless “teddy bear”-like programs and returned home.

The real threat to the children is war – not just the 2022 Russian invasion, but the civil war that started in 2014 with Ukraine’s anti-Russia coup.  The way to protect the children is to end the war.   The indictment makes that harder to do.

Russia doesn’t recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC.  Neither does the USA.

[Update 04/25/2023.  Another view.  I don’t regard Foreign Policy magazine as an impartial source, but the facts seem more ambiguous than I had assumed.

Rescue Efforts Underway for Ukrainian Children Taken to Russia by Liz Cookman for Foreign Policy.]

Underestimating Russia, etc.

[check the comment thread for a correction]

The Russian Federation has not lost a war or failed in a military intervention since it came into existence in 1991.

The United States has not won a war or succeeded in a military intervention since the U.S. attack on Panama in 1989, and this includes campaigns to destroy nations by means of economic sanctions.

As corrupt as Russia is, on many levels, I don’t think its government spends money on weapons that don’t work, promotes generals who lose wars or doubles down on foreign policies that have failed.

At the top levels of the U.S. government and journalism, failure has no consequences.  Yes-men are rewarded, even when they’re proved wrong.  Dissidents are pushed aside, even when they’re proved right.

It is pretty plain that Biden, Blinken and the rest had no idea what they were getting into when they decided on a showdown with Russia.

The economic blowback from the sanctions war is hurting the U.S. and its allies more than it is hurting Russia.   Public opinion polls indicate that average American voters are more concerned about the cost of living than Ukraine.  What nobody has told them is that the sanctions war against Russia is driving up the cost of living.

U.S. spokesmen are talking more and more about the possibility of defeat and the need for negotiations, although I suspect that Vladimir Putin has decided that the USA is, as he puts it, “not agreement-capable.”

I am not a military expert, I’m neither bold enough nor foolish enough to predict the outcome of the Ukraine war, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be of net benefit to the United States or its allies.

Jeffrey Epstein and his protectors, exposed

PERVERSION OF JUSTICE: The Jeffrey Epstein Story by Julie K. Brown (2021)

Jeffrey Epstein was a rapist and a pimp.  He sexually abused young girls and trafficked them out to be abused by others.  

Yet for years he was shielded from criminal charges by his wealth and by his network of rich and powerful protectors.  

We the public may never know the names of Epstein’s clients.  But thanks to the reporting of Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, we do know some other things..

Her book, Perversion of Justice, touches on many aspects of the Epstein case, but the high points are how he used his wealth and connections to shield himself from prosecution for his crimes, and how he used seduction, blackmail and threats to trap young girls into sexual bondage.

She began her investigation in 2017 when Alex Acosta was nominated by President Trump to be Secretary of Labor.  Back in 2008, when Acosta was U.S. attorney for southern Florida, he signed a non-prosecution agreement that allowed Epstein to get off with a wrist slap in return to pleading guilty to trafficking young girls.

The fact that Epstein was prosecuted at all was due to the dogged persistence of Palm Beach Chief of Police and Detective Joe Recarey (who is deceased).  When they began to interview young girls victimized by Epstein, it seemed like an open-and-shut case, but they met resistance every step of the way.

Epstein was a social friend of the mayor of Palm Beach.  He donated expensive equipment to the Palm Beach Police Department and created a scholarship fund for children of police.  He was one of the leading members of the city’s social elite, and he was a lavish giver of gifts and donations to charity..

Epstein’s legal team consisted of Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and high-profile lawyer; Kenneth Starr, the former special prosecutor who brought about the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; and Jay Lefkowitz, a former senior adviser to both Presidents Bush.

He also hired a local lawyer, Jack Goldberger.  That resulted in an aggressive prosecutor, Dahlia Weiss, being pushed off the case, because her husband was one of Goldberger’s law partners.

The defense team gathered information about the girls Epstein had seduced, often looking at their social media and visiting them at their homes, trying to paint them as the seducers or at least as willing.  

One young woman phoned Recarey and told him Epstein’s investigators asked her about things that she had told him that she thought were confidential.  How did the investigator get access to that information? she asked. 

Reiter and Recarey got a search warrant for Epstein’s mansion, but when they got there, it had been stripped clean. Six computer hard drives had been removed.  Video surveillance cameras had been disconnected and the video recordings and other electronic data removed.  Nude photos of young girls that. had adorned the walls had been removed.

They never figured out who told Epstein of the warrant.

Palm Beach County prosecutor Barry Kirschner chose to take the case to a grand jury, although this wasn’t necessary.  He also chose to prosecute only one case, although Recarey had collected information on 14.

The passing scene: March 26, 2021

Here are links to some articles I found interesting, and maybe you will, too.

The US Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, Is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Politics by Glenn Greenwald.

“A letter from House Intelligence Committee members demands answers from the DNI about illegal breaches of the wall guarding against CIA and NSA domestic activity.”

When the CIA was chartered in 1947, it was prohibited from spying on Americans, in part because President Truman was afraid it would get involved in politics.  In the 1960s, the CIA was caught spying on U.S. political activists.  Now it is happening again in the name of a “war on domestic terrorism.”

A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views on the First Amendment by Matt Taibbi for TK News.

“Columbia law professor Timothy Wu wonders if the First Amendment is ‘obsolete’ and believes in ‘returning this country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s’.”

There is a contradiction between the view of Timothy Wu, an appointee to the National Economic Council, that anti-trust enforcement should be a priority in the Biden administration, and his view that Facebook, Google and other social media companies have a responsibility to protect the pubic from false statements.  These companies need monopoly power in order to carry out that mission.

If you give a private corporation or government agency the power and mandate to monitor communication to separate truth from lies, what you’re doing is giving that corporation or that agency a monopoly on lying.

Biden Team Prepares $3 Trillion in New Spending for the Economy by Jim Tankersley for the New York Times.  (Hat tip to Steve from Texas.)

“A pair of proposals would invest in infrastructure, education, workforce development and fighting climate change, with the aim of making the economy more productive.”

The consensus in the Biden administration appears to be that President Obama was too cautious in fighting the 2008 recession, and that they will not repeat that mistake.

Good!  But can he overcome Republican opposition in the Senate?  What about monopoly power, financial fraud, international competitiveness and other problems that can’t be solved simply by flooding the economy with money?  Still, it’s early days and a good start.

Does Biden Really Want to End the Forever Wars? by Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn for The New York Times.  (Hat tip to Steve from Texas) 

“If he does, he must work with Congress and go far beyond narrowing old permission slips for conflict.”

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: If a headline asks a question, the answer is “no.”

Correction

Lee Fang was not fired from his job at The Intercept, and Matt Taibbi did not say he was. I misquoted Taibbi in my post “The American Press Is Destroying Itself.”

‘The American press is destroying itself’

Correction: Lee Fang was not fired from his job at The Intercept.  I misread Matt Taibbi’s article.

Yes, it is.  Matt Taibbi wrote a great article about how editors and publishers at the top levels of American journalism are giving up professional standards of accuracy and fairness in order to advance goals such as unseating Donald Trump and ending racial prejudice.

He tells, for example, of the investigative reporter Lee Fang, who was fired from his job at The Intercept, who was forced to apologize in a humiliating way for quoting a black man who said he was concerned about crime as well as police abuse, and for pointing out that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. opposed violence.

All this, it was decided, represented a degree of racism that was unacceptable, and that canceled out all the good reporting on he had done.

Taibbi pointed out similar episodes concerning the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Variety, but the case of The Intercept was especially ironic because it was founded as an outlet for news stories about corporate and governmental abuse that the NYT and the like feared to discuss.

All this, as Taibbi pointed out, is counter-productive, even on its own terms.  The American people are losing confidence in the press.  Becoming openly propagandistic is going to destroy what little credibility they have.

Taibbi himself was in line to become an editor of The Intercept when it was formed, but he reconsidered and kept his job at Rolling Stone.  More recently he quit that job and went into business as one-line subscription service called Reporting by Matt Taibbi.

He made such a name for himself that he can write and publish without submitting his work to a gatekeeper.   But that’s not possible for the mass of journalists in fear of losing their jobs.

LINKS

The American Press Is Destroying Itself by Matt Taibbi.  Indeed it is.  And It’s not just the press.

Has the American Left Lost Its Mind? by Nathan J. Robinson for Current Affairs [Added 6/16/2020]  A rebuttal.

Piketty on the sacredness of property rights

When English settlers first dealt with American Indians, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of property rights.

The Indians had no idea of buying the exclusive right to use a tract of land, keep everybody else off it and sell the land to someone else.

Thomas Piketty pointed out in his new book, Capital and Ideology, that, in fact, this was a fairly new idea even for the English and other Europeans.

The idea of absolute property rights did not exist in the European middle ages. Someone might have a hereditary right to grow crops on a certain tract of land, a second person the right to 10 percent of all crops grown on the land, a third person the right to grind grain produced on the land for a fixed fee, and so on.

Furthermore the right to land use was not so much bought and sold as inherited.

Medieval France was what Piketty called a “ternary” society—a society in which political power and property ownership were divided between a hereditary noble class who “fought for all” and a priestly class who “prayed for all,” leaving very little for a lower class who “worked for all.”

The “ternary” system existed in the Islamic world, India and many other parts of the world, and it casts its shadow over the present world.  Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (mostly Sunni) are ruled by hereditary monarchs while Iran (mostly Shiite) is ruled by clerics.  In India, the descendants of Brahmins (priests) and Kshatriyas (warriors) are richer and more influential than the Vaishyas (farmers, craftsmen and traders) and Shudras (laborers).

In Europe, uniquely, priests were celibate.  They could not found dynasties.  This mean that the Roman Catholic institutions had to be corporations.  They had to have a continuing existence that was independent of who was in charge.  It’s not accidental that business corporations originated in Europe.

The French Revolution overthrew hereditary property rights and established what Piketty called “proprietarianism” or “the ownership society”—the idea that property rights were sacred, provided that the property was acquired through legitimate purchase.

The accepted story in France is that the revolutionaries divided up the aristocrats’ estates among the peasants and turned France into a nation of small landowners.  In fact, according to Piketty, the revolutionaries made arbitrary distinctions between land that was owned through hereditary privilege and land acquired through voluntary contract, and, in many areas,  property ownership remained almost as concentrated as before.

Piketty wrote that the revolution was one of history’s “switch points.”  He thinks it could have been more radically egalitarian than it was.

In fact, concentration of wealth in France at the beginning of the 20th century was even greater than at the time of the French Revolution.

What the Green New Deal proposes

ADDED 3/24/2019.  I MADE A BIG MISTAKE HERE.  THIS IS THE DRAFT PROPOSAL BY ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ, NOT THE VERSION THAT WAS ACTUALLY INTRODUCED.

The Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey proposes to address a climate change crisis and a social-economic crisis.  Here’s a quick summary of what they specifically propose.

• Build infrastructure to create resiliency against climate change-related disasters
• Repair and upgrade U.S. infrastructure, including ensuring universal access to clean water.
• Meet 100% of power demand through clean and renewable energy sources
• Build energy-efficient, distributed smart grids and ensure affordable access to electricity
• Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency
• Massively expand clean manufacturing (such as solar panel factories, wind turbine factories, battery and storage manufacturing, energy-efficient manufacturing components) and remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing “as much as is technically feasible.”
• Work with farmers and ranchers to create a sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas-free, food system that ensures universal access to healthy food and expands independent family farming.
• Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becomes unnecessary and create affordable public transit available to all, with the goal of replacing every combustion-engine vehicle.
• Mitigate long-term health effects of climate change and pollution
• Remove greenhouse gases from our atmosphere and pollution through afforestation, preservation and other methods of restoring our natural ecosystems
• Restore all our damaged and threatened ecosystems
• Clean up all the existing hazardous waste sites and abandoned sites, identify new emission sources and create solutions to eliminate those emissions
• Make the US the leader in addressing climate change and share our technology, expertise and products with the rest of the world to bring about a global Green New Deal.

Hillary Clinton and her war hawks

Correction: I mischaracterized Michele Flournoy’s position, based on reporting by Michael Tucker of Defense One, which was quoted by Glenn Greenwald.  For Michele Flournoy’s rebuttal, read her letter below the fold.

Hillary Clinton’s two likely choices for Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense are Victoria Nuland and Michéle Flournoy, both war hawks.

Nuland would intensify confrontation with Russia.  Flournoy would send more U.S. troops step up military activity in the Middle East.

The U.S. is already dangerously close to war with Russia, and U.S. interventions in the Middle East have only made things worse.

A Hillary Clinton administration would not back off from these dangerous and counterproductive war policies.  It would double down on them.

LINKS

Hillary Clinton’s Likely Pentagon Chief Already Advocating for More Bombing and Intervention by Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

Hillary Clinton’s Likely Defense Secretary Wants More US Troops Fighting ISIS and Assad by Patrick Tucker for Defense One.  [added later]

Clinton’s Hawk-in-Waiting by Philip Giraldi for The American Conservative.

Neocon War Hawks Want Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump: No Surprise—They’ve Always Backed Her by Branco Marcetic for In These Times.

Potential Hillary Clinton Pentagon chief calls for increased action against Isis by David Smith for The Guardian.

The Mess that Nuland Made by Robert Parry for Consortium News.

A note on the TPP and fast track

I’ve been writing about the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership agreement as if it were a done deal, and the only significance of the Trade Promotion Authority bill, aka “fast track,” in regard to the TPP is to push it through with a minimum of debate.  This is not so.

I do in fact think that is the significance of “fast track,” but I should emphasize that the TPP is not a done deal.  The Japanese government is balking at some of the proposals and, without Japan, the TPP would be meaningless.

So a “fast track” plan that allowed Congress to give meaningful input into the negotiations would be important.  Whether or not the Wyden-Hatch-Ryan bill does this is an important question.

Google and cost obsessions in 50 state capitals

Click to enlarge.

Hat tip to kottke.org.

This seems to be completely bogus.  I apologize for posting it.  When I did the Google autocomplete for Albany, NY, I got as a first result “taxi,” as a second result “artificial insemination” and for a third result “web site.”  Not “pound of weed.”  So either the results are random, or they’re based on some bogus algorithm which is different for each person.

Americans in most states seem to be more concerned about the cost of sex, drugs, personal appearance and government services than the cost of anything else.

The map shows what Google autocomplete tells you when you do a Google search for “how much does * cost” in the capitals of each of the 50 states.

Of course the capitals may not be indicative of the states as a whole.  The top autocomplete for Albany, NY, was “pound of weed”.   When I tried it for my home city of Rochester, NY, I got “taxi” for my first autocomplete choice, “Tesla” for my second and some roofing companies at the top of my Google search.

I find these results interesting and amusing, although not proof of anything.

LINK

What Cost Is Each State Obsessed With on Fixr.   The original post, with a larger map, background details and a link to a chart.

Correction

My post entitled Going to war for oil doesn’t make any sense conflated the oil embargo of 1973 with the oil crisis of 1979.

Going to war for oil doesn’t make any sense

One of the justifications for going to war in the Middle East is to make sure we Americans have access to oil.

During the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, Secretary of State James Baker said the issue was “jobs, jobs, jobs.”  He didn’t explain, but what I and other Americans took him to mean that if Saddam Hussein cut us off from the oil of Kuwait, our industrial machine would falter.

But there was no danger of that happening.  Saddam Hussein was perfectly happy to sell Iraq’s oil, and would have been perfectly happy to sell Kuwait’s oil.

The oil-producing nations have just as much need to sell their oil as the oil-consuming nations have to buy it.

U.S. interventions in the Middle East have reduced American access to oil, not secured it.  The sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, the continuing sanctions against Iran and the new sanctions against Russia have been intended to prevent these nations from selling their oil and natural gas.  The invasion of Iraq destroyed much of that nation’s oil-producing capability, which is only now recovering.

All this made oil and gas prices higher, not lower.

The only time U.S. access to Middle East oil was cut off was during the OPEC oil embargo of 1973.  But the embargo was broken without military action.  It was broken by the international oil companies who sold the oil to whoever wanted to buy it.  [1]

Since then there has never been another threat to U.S. oil imports.  The most strongly anti-American leaders, Libya’s Qaddafi and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, never refused to do business with the United States.  Politics was one thing; business, another.

Correction: No official regrets on Obama’s Nobel

My previous post, linking to a report that the Nobel Committee had expressed regrets about Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, was wrong.

I fell for an Internet hoax.  I apologize for the error.  I feel embarrassed at my gullibility and failure to check.

I thank William Hungerford for asking verification.

Obama and peace: Links & comments 9/12/14

NO, NO, NO – THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN – I WAS TAKEN IN BY AN INTERNET HOAX.

See What was fake on the Internet this week! .

Nobel Committee Regrets Obama Peace Prize: official statement.

Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 before he had an opportunity as President to do much of anything either for or against world peace.

Their thinking arose out of a relief that George W. Bush was no longer President, and a hope that the Peace Prize award would motivate him to be a peacemaker.

His response, when receiving the prize, was to lecture the Norwegian Nobel Institute on the evils of pacifism and the responsibility of the United States to use military force for good objectives.

The Nobel Committee stated that awarding the Peace Prize seemed at the time like a good way of advancing peace, but now this is no longer the case.

Does anybody know of any precedent for the Nobel Committee expressing regret at the awarding of any previous prize?  I can’t think of any.

Obama just announced he wants to help the guys who kidnaped Steven Sotloff by Joseph Cannon for Cannonfire (via Naked Capitalism).

President Obama’s policy is to help the Free Syrian Army as an alternative to both Bashar al-Assad’s government and the Islamic State (ISIS) forces in Syria.  But evident it was the FSA to kidnapped the American reporter, Steven Sotloff and sold him to ISIS so they could make a video of him being beheaded.

The various militias fighting the Assad government are more alike than they are different.  For one thing, they all want to wipe out Syria’s ancient Christian community.

Could Jim Webb Mount a Credible Challenge to Clinton? by Albert R. Hunt for BloombergView.

I admire Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for her willingness to take on Wall Street financiers, but she is a down-the-line supporter of the Obama administration’s war policies.  Former Senator James Webb of Virginia is not only anti-Wall Street, but anti-interventionist and opposed to the drug laws that have resulted in mass incarceration of young black people.

Webb is a former Marine, a decorated combat veteran of Vietnam, a novelist and former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration.  He broke with the Republican Party because he opposed the George W. Bush administration’s war policies and its captivity to Wall Street.   Unfortunately the Obama administration was no improvement, and Hillary Clinton would be even worse.

Webb is an opponent of gun control, has reservations about feminism (especially as applied to the military) and differs with many Democrats on social issues that are dear to their hearts.  I don’t think any of these things matter so much as peace, economic justice and fundamental civil liberties.

Surge in migrant children? Maybe not

Has there been a surge in the number of unaccompanied central American children trying to cross the border into the United States?  Are they fleeing gang violence?

Maybe not, according to Prof. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, of the UCLA Department of Chicano and Chicano Studies, in a report released Tuesday.  Gang violence is indeed a serious problem in central America, and unaccompanied children from Honduras and other Central American countries do deserve the hearings guaranteed by Wilberforce Trafficking Reauthorization Act of 2008, he said.

But the ups and downs in the number of unauthorized immigrants, including children, are related to the ups and downs of the U.S. economy and, in particular, the unemployment rate among Hispanic people in the USA, not to trends in crime in Central America.  The murder rate in Honduras peaked several years ago, he noted.

There has been an increase in the reported number of unaccompanied children, but Hinojosa-Ojeda thinks that is because Immigration and Customs Enforcement has had to do a more thorough job of reporting because of the Wilberforce act.

I don’t think my previous posts about child refugees from gang violence were contrary to fact.  I don’t think the people I quoted made up the stories they told about young boys and girls being forcibly inducted into gangs.  But this is not the whole story.

Click on The Economic Recovery, Not Gang Violence, Caused the Border Crisis for an interview with Hinojosa-Ojeda in The New Republic giving another angle on gang violence. (Hat tip to Mike the Mad Biologist)

[Update 8/20/14]  On second thought, maybe it doesn’t matter whether the unaccompanied migrant children represent a “surge” on not.

Five Children Murdered After They Were Deported Back to Honduras by Esther Yu-Hsi Lee for Think Progress.

Correction: Amazon not world’s largest retailer

Contrary to what I wrote in Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to buy Washington Post, Amazon is not the world’s largest retailer.   It is the largest on-line retailer, but is far behind Wal-Mart and other giants in total sales.

Click on 2013 Top 100 Retailers for information about its revenues and ranking.

Correction: Photo’s terrorist, not drone, killing

About a year ago, I put up a post about the killing of innocent people in Pakistan by U.S. flying killer drones.  I linked to photos by Noor Behram, an intrepid Pakistani photographer who traveled to the tribal areas of Pakistan and documented the deaths caused by the drones.  But the photograph with which I led the post was apparently not taken by Noor Behram and was not of drone victims, but was a news photo of innocent victims of a terrorist attack in the city of Peshawar.

Click on “Not a single collateral death” for the post with correction.

Wendell Castle’s 10 Adopted Rules of Thumb

1. If you’re in love with an idea, you are no judge of its beauty or value.

2. It is difficult to see the whole picture when you are inside the
frame.

3. After learning the tricks of the trade, don’t think you know the
trade.

4. We hear and apprehend what we already know.

5. The dog that stays on the porch will find no bones.

6. Never state a problem to yourself in the same terms it was brought to you.

7. If it’s offbeat or surprising, it’s probably useful.

8. If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it.

9. Don’t get too serious.

10. If you hit the bull’s eye every time, the target is too close.

Wendell Castle

Wendell Castle is an American furniture artist and a leading figure in American craft.  I copied his Rules of Thumb off a poster years ago.  He taught at Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Craftsmen, and has a studio in Scottsville, N.Y.

In an earlier version of this, I conflated Wendell Castle with the metal sculptor Albert Paley