Stupidity Watch 1

My father was a child slave laborer for the Nazis. He was taken into custody when he was about 11 when my grandfather and great uncle were arrested for being part of the Polish Underground where, as lawyers, they had been getting fake paperwork for Jews to get out of Nazi occupied Poland. In the 1970s when I was about 10 years old I remember being with my grandfather when he received a phone call essentially from Israel. It was a strange conversation, and at the end I asked him what it was. He said that something like 92 people had identified him specifically as the lawyer that had gotten them their paperwork to get out of Poland, and they were now living in Israel or New York, and had been interviewed to figure out who had helped people escape the Holocaust. I think they were trying to offer him some status called, “Righteous Among the Nations,” or something that came with Israeli citizenship and free healthcare, and they mostly wanted to give him the acknowledgement. He politely turn...

     Over a hundred years ago black Americans began migrating to the north for job opportunities, and in 1910 there were already 6,000 black residents in Detroit, in 1940 there were 100,000, in 1950 there were 200,000, and by 1970 there were 660,000 black residents in Detroit. The period from 1910 to 1970 that saw a total of 6 million rural blacks leave Southern States for the north is called the Great Migration or the Great Northern Migration.       World War 2 provided even more jobs in Detroit as Ford and the other Detroit car companies switched to building military equipment. But during the war and throughout the 1940s the big 3 automakers built 25 new plants in former farmland outside of Detroit, and while there were jobs there, community standards kept blacks from moving near the new factories, and even commuting through white suburbs was risky.      The population of Detroit reached 1.8 million in 1950 with 1.5 million white res...