"Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, Utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way."

-- P.J. O'Rourke, "The End of the Affair" in last Saturday's Wall Street Journal

"You cannot slander human nature; it is worse than words can paint it."

-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The demand that the Atonement shall be exhibited in vital relation to a new life in which sin is overcome... is entirely legitimate, and it touches a weak point in the traditional Protestant doctrine. Dr. (Thomas) Chalmers tells us that he was brought up--such was the effect of the current orthodoxy upon him--in a certain distrust of good works.

Some were certainly wanted, but not as being themselves salvation, only, as he puts it, as tokens of justification. It was a distinct stage in his religious progress when he realized that true justification sanctifies, and that the soul can and ought to abandon itself spontaneously and joyfully to do the good that it delights in.

The modern mind assumes what Dr. Chalmers painfully discovered. An atonement that does not regenerate, it truly holds, is not an atonement in which men can be asked
to believe.

... James Denney (1856-1917),
The Atonement and the Modern Mind, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903, pp. 62-63

"Arbeit macht frei" is a German phrase meaning "work brings freedom" or "work shall set you free/will free you" or "work liberates" and, literally in English, "work makes (one) free". The slogan is known for being placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps.


In 1872 the German nationalist author Lorenz Diefenbach used the expression "Arbeit macht frei" as the title for a novel, causing the expression to become well-known in nationalist circles. It was adopted in 1928 by the Weimar government as a slogan extolling the effects of their desired policy of large-scale public works programmes to end unemployment, and mocking the Medieval slogan "Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air brings freedom"). It was continued in this usage by the NSDAP (Nazi Party) when it came to power in 1933.

Nazi use

The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps "as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom."[1]

Although it was common practice in Germany to post inscriptions of this sort at entrances to institutional properties and large estates, the slogan's use in this instance was ordered by SS General Theodor Eicke, inspector of concentration camps and first commandant of Dachau Concentration Camp.

The slogan can still be seen at several sites, including the entrance to Auschwitz I—although, according to Auschwitz: a New History, by BBC historian Laurence Rees, it was placed there by commandant Rudolf Höß, who believed that doing menial work during his own imprisonment under the Weimar Republic had helped him through the experience. At Auschwitz, the upper bowl in the "B" in "ARBEIT" is wider than the lower bowl, appearing to some as upside-down. Several geometrically constructed sans-serif typefaces of the 1920s experimented with this variation.

The slogan can also be seen at the Dachau concentration camp, Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, and the Theresienstadt Ghetto-Camp.

At Buchenwald, however, "Jedem das Seine" ("To each his own") was used instead.

In 1938 the Austrian political cabaret writer Jura Soyfer and the composer Herbert Zipper, while prisoners at Dachau Concentration Camp, wrote the "Dachaulied" (The Dachau Song). They had spent weeks marching in and out of the camp's gate to daily forced labor, and considered the motto "Arbeit macht frei" over the gate an insult. The song repeats the phrase cynically as a "lesson" taught by Dachau. (The first verse is translated in the article on Jura Soyfer.)

You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

--George Orwell

An Open Letter to Andy Clarke, LAB, and LCIs.

August 28, 2008

Andy Clarke

Executive Director

League of American Bicyclists

Dear Andy, et al,

I couldn’t help but read your rather uninformed and misleading comments about cycling in Dallas on the LCI forum. What I believe you meant to say was that Dallas doesn’t employ bike lanes, and is therefore bicycle unfriendly (by your criteria). A point-by-point refutation of your comments would be pointless (I already did that with the fact-deprived Bicycling Magazine piece I now suspect you may have contributed to), but I will endeavor to counter your uninformed opinions with facts.

Our trip mode share for bicycle/pedestrians is as high as 12% in the core of the city (not just the downtown area with its high ped rates, but in the close-in residential areas). The mode share for the suburban communities north of Dallas is closer to 1%. Not much Dallas can do about that… these towns seem to resent us trying to tell them what to do.

For the city proper, our trip mode share for bicycles and pedestrians equals or exceeds that of our light rail and bus public transportation system (neither as high as I’d like to see, but with the lowest population density of any MSA in the nation, I’m pleased we’ve had some success).

Did I fail to mention the lack of a major public or private university in my fair city, and the automatic bump of 10,000 – 75,000 potential part-time cyclists that a university automatically brings? Take Oregon State University out of Corvallis, and tell me what you’d see. Take the University of Wisconsin out of Madison and look at the results. Unmentioned by anyone is the dismal rate of continuing cycling activity of college and university students nursed on bike-lane systems once they enter the mainstream, either because it never “takes”, or because they take the “cyclist inferiority complex” bike-lane systems engender to heart.

The “June of Death” horror stories that garnered so much attention for Dallas cover a 12 county region the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined (plus some), with almost 5 million people, over roughly an eight week period. Two cyclists’ deaths were on a rural road when a speeding SUV driven by a DUI hit them early on a Sunday morning. Another teenage cyclist died in a suburb of unclear causes (beyond being hit by a car). Another “cyclist’ died in another county when her mother backed over her in the driveway of their home. That was it. No cyclist deaths in the City of Dallas, btw. There were a few non-fatal collisions as well (including one very serious on within the city), as there always are in the late spring, and always will be. Rumors, exaggerations, and (quite frankly) fear-mongering spread like wildfire, in large part because of Bike DFW innocently basking in the always anti-cycling media’s warm glow (“if it bleeds, it leads”) in what I feel was their misguided attempt to draw attention to the needs of cyclists.

Statistically, there was no outbreak of deaths or injuries outside of the national norm, just as the rate of cycling is consistent with the land use patterns. Some of the cyclists you must have talked to in this area, the loudest complainers, are the very ones responsible for several bike bans in rural communities due to their Saturday and Sunday morning mass training rides that flagrantly break traffic laws, and block intersections, causing all cyclists to suffer due to their selfish and boorish behaviors. And then they complain.

Is everything perfect here? Hardly, especially not in the far northern suburbs. But neither is it anyplace else, either. Is Dallas “bicycle unfriendly, with no place to ride, and no one riding” as you said? Absolutely untrue.

The City of Dallas has:

The nation’s largest bicycle commuter system based upon the principals of Vehicular Cycling, guided in its conception by Effective Cycling adherents, and EC Certified Instructors.

800 lane miles of signed, cyclist selected bike routes -- 700 miles of which are on low volume local streets -- that will easily convey a competent cyclist anywhere in town.

30 lane miles of thoroughfares with wide outside lanes.

All parallel drain grates removed on over 3500 miles of city streets and replaced with bicycle friendly grate designs (a seemingly small, yet very expensive, and very important, project solely for the benefit of bicycle transportation).

Special attention paid to adjusting signal detectors to find the “sweet spot” that allows bicycles to be detected without false triggers of passing perpendicular traffic.

50 lanes miles of streets on the inventory needs list to get WOLs when the streets are reconstructed (ever try widening a street in an historic district? Or taking away a business or homeowners parking?).

If MUPs are your thing, Dallas has 100 miles of paved trails, 35 of which serve a viable transportation function. Another 75 miles of 12’ wide concrete trails are either under construction, in design, or fully funded waiting for funds availability (tied to budget years).

You may view the commuter route system here, in operation since 1985. http://www.dallascityhall.com/pwt/bike_links.html

Frankly, I’m very disappointed in both you and LAB. Your comments aren’t just directed at the City of Dallas. Ultimately, your comments are directed at the very concept of Vehicular Cycling, and the core principals that the League was founded upon.

Sincerely yours,

PM Summer

ECI (and former LCI) #349