Brian,

Reminds me: somewhere I read that a reason the Jews were relatively 
passive in the early portions of the holocaust (Warsaw ghetto in 
particular) was that they did not tend to beat and terrorize their 
children whereas the Germans were easily excited to SS activity and 
beyond as they were all very much in the habit of beating and 
terrorizing their children. I am of fairly recent German ancestry with a 
bit more distance on the Scot. I have no idea if the comment is true or 
a stereotype. I do know that if one is brought up in an environment 
where they are subject to violence or terror that it provides a very 
difficult cycle of reaction to break out of.

To live a life without fear seems to me an admirable goal. It is the 
salvation from fear that is the promise that I find in the example of 
Jesus. Though I remain adamant in my conviction as a Theocratic Anarchist.

I also came across recently, "Spare the rod, spoil the husband." That 
seemed a bit kinky to me.

A while back two baby experts died. One believed to spank, and one to 
not. Seems interesting to me that you can have two bonifide 'experts' on 
opposite sides of anything like this. Who wooda thought it possible? 
They both died without ever resolving the issue. The relevance of this 
discussion to histo presto is to recognise how many experts there are in 
historic preservation. As well that you can spend twenty years listening 
to ppl say the same crap over and over.

I had a cousin who was brought up on the Spock method but I'm not sure 
what variation it was as he was not allowed to play in the dirt pile 
with us with our Tonka toys, stones and sticks. Go figure. He grew up to 
be something of a whimp... though I may be corrected in that I think he 
also grew up to be a butcher.

My last impression of him I was using an auger drill to drill through a 
floor joist, working overhead from a step ladder. You have to be fairly 
well braced and determined to drill a hole in order to do this. He asked 
if he could try it. I obliged him. Why not? He pulled the trigger, the 
auger caught and did one of those mad twist around maneuvers that wraps 
the cord several times around the drill body and tries to wrench your 
arm out of the shoulder socket while breaking your wrist. If you are 
really good and only haphazardly braced it also tries to whip around the 
side handle to smash into you skull and poke your eye out. Then it 
knocked him off the step ladder. In most cases the auger stays in the 
joist with the drill hanging from it that jerks up and down a few times 
as if to say, "So there!" It was a surprise to me though he did not 
think it was and that I had meant it to happen. I suppose it reinforced 
that he should stay away from playing with toys. It has been more than 
thirty years now since I have seen or heard from him.

][<

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